Complete guide to Google algorithm updates history

With multiple updates every year since at least 2002, Google’s algorithm update history is long and complex. As the internet and technology used have evolved, so has the search engine giant, in order to deliver the best possible and most helpful results for users.

Below, we have outlined significant updates, starting with the most recent, and going back to the earliest documented Google update in 2002.

2024 Google Updates

March Core Update 2024

This seemed to be a major update, which took around six weeks to roll out (about 3x the normal length of time) and affected many websites. This change was partly focused on identifying low-quality content (including AI-generated copy with little to no value to users) and promised a 45% reduction in low-quality, unoriginal content in search results. Alongside this, the update also updated the core algorithm to include Google’s helpful content system, with the aim of taking a more holistic approach to assessing the value and worth of a website. Some sites saw heavy penalties after this update, including removal from the index altogether. The common factor was that the affected websites had used AI-generated content to some degree, according to research by Originality.ai.

Spam Update (March 2024)

At the same time as the March core update, Google rolled out a spam update that seemed to be targeted at AI-generated content spam and they also introduced three new spam policies. These were:

• Scaled content abuse – identifying and penalising any low-quality content produced by a website at scale that is primarily for ranking purposes.
• Expired domain abuse – identifying and penalising the practice of buying expired domains and repurposing them to try and gain good rankings for low-quality content.
• Site reputation abuse (which didn’t roll out until later in the year) – identifying and penalising the practice of producing low-quality content for publication on third-party websites to try and boost rankings by leveraging the third party’s ‘reputation’.

AI Overviews rolled out to the UK (August 2024)

While not an organic search algorithm update as such, AI overviews started to appear in some UK search results from August onwards, having previously been launched in the US in May. This is what many saw as the next stage of ‘zero-click marketing’, where Google provides so much information in the SERPs themselves that users don’t actually need to visit other sites to find the information they’re after.

Check out our take on whether we should optimise for AI overviews.

2024 Core Updates (August, November and December 2024)

The August core update focused on prioritising genuinely helpful content in search results, while November’s core update seemed to tweak the way that Google chose sources to cite in their AI overviews, which started to align more closely with top organic search results for the same search terms. The December core update followed closely on the heels of the previous one and despite the specific details of what changed being unclear, it seemed to have a significant impact on many rankings for websites across all sectors. Google continued to advise any website affected by a core update to focus on creating helpful, reliable and people-first content that meets their E-E-A-T framework guidelines.

2023 Google Updates

Google implemented lots of changes in 2023, with multiple updates impacting online reviews as well as focuses on spam detection. During this year, several updates overlapped, making it more tricky for websites experiencing visibility drops to work out which update had made the difference. Some of the major changes included:

Product Reviews Update (February 2023)

In another change to the way that Google handles product reviews, this update focused mainly on rewarding blogs, articles and pages that included analysis and original research or tests in relation to the products that were conducted by ‘experts’ in that area. Any reviews featuring on product pages or service pages were not included in this update.

Core Updates (March, August, October and November 2023)

A bumper year for core updates, this resulted in lots of SERP volatility for many websites across all sectors during the time of rollout (usually a couple of weeks at a time), but few official details were released. It’s unclear exactly which parts of the algorithm of Google systems were affected by each of these updates, but there were some winners and losers as always in terms of rankings. The below graphic by Semrush gives a taste of what their data showed about different sectors after the final core update of the year in November 2023.

Source: Semrush

2022 Google Updates

2022 again saw multiple updates throughout the year, including at least two core updates and two spam updates, along with:

Page Experience Update – Desktop (February 2022)

This update implemented the rollout of the 2021 Page Experience Update for mobile to also now include desktop. The graphic above from Google helps to show the various elements involved.

Product Reviews Updates (March, July and September 2022)

These tweaks to the way Google handled product reviews, following up the two updates to this area in 2021, are thought to be focused on ensuring there was a level of in-depth analysis of the product included in the review, along with indications of actual product use and tests conducted by the reviewer and unique information about the product that other people might find useful. This seemed mainly to focus primarily on product review articles rather than customer reviews.

Helpful Content Update (August and December 2022)

Unusually, the first part of this update in August 2022 was accompanied by a fairly in-depth announcement by Google. Essentially, the update aimed to reward content that delivered a great response to the user’s intent when searching, while also sticking to the SEO next practice guidelines of old. The focus was on user-first content and NOT content created primarily for search engines.

There was another tweak in December 2022, which seemed to enable Google’s system to better detect low-quality content that didn’t bring anything useful or unique to the party.

Read our guide to Google’s Helpful Content Update.

E-A-T became E-E-A-T (December 2022)

Google’s previous quality rater guidelines used to reference the acronym E-A-T, which stood for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, specifically in relation to assessing the quality and usefulness of online content. The extra ‘E’ added in December 2022 stands for Experience, with Google stressing the importance of authors showing that they have genuinely relevant first-hand experience of the topic at hand.

While not strictly an algorithm update, this change to guidelines does directly impact content’s potential to rank well, from what we can tell.

Find out more about Google E-E-A-T.

2021 Google Updates

Product Reviews updates (April and December 2021)

In a world where user reviews are an important trust signal and can play a big role in buying decisions, Google rolled out the first update in April to reward in-depth product reviews over those which were thin in content or simply affiliate spam rather than genuine and useful reviews. This was followed up by another product review update in December 2021, which seemed to reward review content that went above and beyond the standard template.

MUM (May 2021)

As a follow up to BERT, MUM (which is short for Multitask Unified Model) was the new and improved, super-efficient version, changing how Google handled and interpreted search requests through AI. The aim was to generate more accurate and relevant results based on the perceived context of the search queries used.

Page Experience update (June 2021)

A confirmed update that arrived in the middle of 2021 to tweak the way in which web pages signal to Google that they offer great user experiences on mobile. This increased the chances of an eligible page appearing in Google’s top stories section and carousel.

Spam updates (June, July and November 2021)

There were several spam updates in 2021, but little information was given about most of them. The general consensus in the SEO community is that these updates, including a link spam one, focused on areas such as sponsored, affiliate and guest content including links, along with untrustworthy or harmful website indexing being filtered out of the index.

Top Stories Redesign (December 2021)

A SERP design update rather than anything directly algorithm-related, this change saw the amount of space in results pages dedicated to news stories significantly increase, especially on desktop. This not only pushed down ‘normal’ organic results, it also gave more opportunities for eligible news stories to feature.

2020 Google Updates

Due to the global pandemic in 2020, which caused huge changes in people’s search and online behaviour, this was a fairly quiet year in terms of major updates. There were still at least three core updates, which seemed mainly to focus on rewarding websites which displayed and embodied their E-E-A-T signals, with trust signals a major focus. Other significant changes in 2020 included:

Mobile-first indexing (September 2020)

After several years of testing and several delays, Google announced that they had fully moved to mobile-first indexing (rather than desktop indexing) which meant that a website would first be assessed and indexed based on it’s mobile user experience and optimisation, rather than with how it appeared on desktop browsers.

2019 Google Updates

Core updates (March and June 2019)

These two separate core updates seemed to be a follow up to the previous year’s Medic update. Some major publishers and retailers in the UK were reportedly significantly affected by June’s rollout, as seen in this graphic using data from Sistrix.

Source: SISTRIX

Site Diversity update (June 2019)

In a bid to stop SERP domination by websites that had several organic listings showing up in results at one time, the Site Diversity update attempted to make it so that no more than two organic results from the same site showed up in most Google searches, although there were exceptions. This change did help smaller websites trying to compete on some ‘hard to rank for’ keywords to gain more organic visibility.

BERT (October to December 2019)

In a big update to Google’s algorithm, BERT (which is an abbreviation of the very snappily named ‘Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers’) aimed to improve the search engine’s understanding of language and context through machine learning and deliver relevant results even when the search terms used were unusual or framed in an unexpected way.

Google gave the below example in their announcement of this rollout, which took several months globally.

Source: Google

2018 Google Updates

Broad Core Algorithm updates (March/April 2018)

These two separate core updates caused lots of ranking fluctuations, with Google representatives confirming that producing great and highly relevant content should be the focus for websites wanting to rank well.

Medic update (August 2018)

Named Medic because websites in the health sector and other YMYL niches were heavily affected, Medic was an update that had a huge impact on the organic visibility of many websites virtually overnight. While little official information was released by Google, the SEO community attributed this update to Google’s continued focus on encouraging websites to produce high-quality content, created with topic expertise, authority and trustworthiness at the centre.

2017 Google Updates

Intrusive Interstitial Penalty (January 2017)

Interstitials, also known as adverts that appear while you’re waiting for a web page to load, and pop-up ads, were both prevalent at this time, which Google tried to counteract with this update. Again, there was pre-warning that this update was coming, which enabled webmasters and SEOs to change their sites before the update kicked in.

Fred (March 2017)

An unconfirmed update, Fred seems to focus on de-ranking pages that had thin content, used lots of ads or were considered low-quality.

Maccabees update (December 2017)

Google released what they called ‘several minor improvements’ this month, but many SEOs and webmasters found that their websites lost a big chunk of organic traffic and lots of previously steady rankings.

2016 Google Updates

2016 seemed to be something of a consolidation year for Google Search, with several updates to previous algorithm tweaks rolled out, such as new iterations of Panda, Penguin, Mobile-friendly and a raft of smaller unnamed updates. Penguin was announced as now being in real-time and part of the core algorithm, with a shift in focus from penalising sites with ‘bad’ links to simply devaluing those links instead.

2015 Google Updates

Mobile-friendly update, or “Mobilegeddon” (April 2015)

Google actually pre-warned about the update, which was an extremely rare occurrence. It essentially started ranking mobile-friendly web pages (rather than the website as a whole) more favourably from April 2015, but the impact wasn’t as dramatic as many feared. Probably, at least in part, because many SEOs and webmasters had used the warning period to better optimise their websites for mobile devices.

RankBrain (October 2015)

Google announced that they had been utilising machine learning as part of the algorithm for several months already, which they called RankBrain. The role that this played was to help process some search results, rather than being the fundamental element that powered the whole of Google Search.

2014 Google Updates

Pigeon (July to December 2014)

A fairly significant update for local SEO, Pigeon seemed to change the way that Google dealt with location cues, bringing the local and core algorithms closer together. As always, there were winners and losers, with some local rankings fluctuating widely. It wasn’t rolled out to the UK until December of 2014.

HTTPS/SSL update (August 2014)

With this update, Google announced that they would be giving ‘secure’ sites preferential treatment in the rankings. Thus making sure your website had an active security certificate became a firm ranking signal.

2013 Google Updates

Payday Loan update (June 2013)

Some online niches at this point in time had extremely spammy Google results, with websites appearing one day, mainly using black hat SEO techniques to push themselves to the top of the rankings quickly, then disappearing again in a matter of days or weeks. They then repeated the cycle again with a new domain to get as much business as possible before Google penalised them. The biggest offender in this at the time was the Payday Loan sector. This update targeted the payday loan industry specifically, along with other search niches which were considered spammy, to stop these sites from ranking as well in the first place.

Hummingbird (August 2013)

Hummingbird was thought to be a core algorithm update that integrated elements of semantic search and the Knowledge Graph further than before. Essentially it was a new version of the main Google Search algorithm, much like Caffeine was in 2010.

Authorship update (December 2013)

With the launch of Google+ back in 2011, Google had started to show listings from known ‘authors’ (i.e. people with a content publishing history who also had a Google+ account) in the SERPs. There were other ways to indicate that someone had authored content too, such as using the rel=author markup in the webpage code. December 2013 started the beginning of the end of this experiment by Google, as they began to phase out author photos appearing in the search listings, like the one pictured below from Search Engine Land. They would go on to remove further search experience features related to this version of ‘authors’ in later updates.

Source: Search Engine Land

2012 Google Updates

In 2012, the updates continued to flow, with many new iterations of Panda throughout alongside the other changes. Some of the notable updates in 2012 included:

Top Heavy/Ads Above the Fold (January 2012)

This confirmed Google algorithm update focused on websites which had a lot of ad space above the fold, meaning that users would have to scroll down to see the actual content they visited the site for. Many sites with this kind of layout experienced ranking fluctuations and ‘devaluing’ as a result of this update.

Venice (February 2012)

This update was part of a regular monthly algorithm refresh, but deserves a namecheck because it focused on local organic results and taking into account main search results as a signal to trigger local ones. For example, someone searching for an “emergency plumber“ would be much more likely to get results for plumbers in their local area, without the search query needing to specify a location. This is something we all take for granted in modern Google Search, but it wasn’t the case until this point.

Penguin (April 2012)

There had been a lot of chatter in the SEO community, and we knew it was coming, but the Penguin update still sent shockwaves through the industry. Targeting spammy links in a new way, this update penalised website rankings significantly if the link profile was considered unnatural. While the main focus was of course on penalising websites which engaged in spammy link building tactics, it also became a way for those with nefarious intentions to perform ‘negative SEO’ on competing websites. Buying lots of spamtastic links to point at another brand’s website could result in them getting a penalty and your site overtaking them in the rankings. Thankfully, Google soon provided some ways to fight back against negative SEO attacks.

Knowledge Graph (May 2012)

While not an algorithm update, the Knowledge Graph rollout had a real impact on SEO because it provided another opportunity for visibility in the SERPs. It provided additional factual information about the things, people and places being searched for. The beginnings of a more semantic search experience and some elements of this are still seen in our search results today.

The below image, from Google’s Knowledge Graph announcement, shows what this looked like at the time.

Source: Google

Pirate (August 2012)

Aimed at websites which repeatedly violated copyright laws (or at least were accused of such), the Pirate confirmed update penalised these sites with ranking drops. This seemed to be based on information from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests lodged against a website. The update relied on people taking the time and effort to make a request, then every request had to be manually assessed before any action was taken.

Exact Match Domain update (September 2012)

Back in the day, buying an exact match domain for your website was a surefire way to rank well for that search term. For example, if your business sold wooden toothpicks and you built your website on the domain www.woodentoothpicks.com, that’s an exact match domain. This confirmed update was aimed at giving an exact match domain less credit just on that factor alone. It didn’t necessarily mean that woodentoothpicks.com would no longer rank well for people searching for ‘wooden toothpicks’, but the website would have to have more going for it than the domain name to continue to do well in organic search.

2011 Google Updates

2011 was a bumper year for Google algorithm updates, with their huge Panda update spanning several releases globally over the course of around 10 months, alongside multiple smaller updates focusing on other areas. We’ve not included every single update, but the notable ones included:

Panda (February to November 2011)

As a solution to content farms, thin content and sites with a high ratio of ads to content, the Panda update hit the US in February and rolled out to Europe by April. It had a huge impact, affecting up to 12% of search results. In the second half of the year, Google entered what has been coined ‘Panda Flux’, where multiple small Panda updates were pushed out frequently.

With the benefit of hindsight, Panda had a huge and far-reaching impact on SEO and online content, with the focus firmly on rewarding sites with high-quality content and penalising those with poor content. Find out more about the long-term effect of the Panda update.

Google+ launch (June 2011)

Google’s attempt to get on the social media train launched and quickly reached 10 million users within the first two weeks. On the surface, Google+ wasn’t directly related to search, but new authorship features meant that it soon played a bigger role in the SERPs and how content was ranked.

Schema.org (June 2011)

Schema.org was launched in 2011, as a joint project with several search engines. Schema, also known as structured data, is code which can be added to web pages. It can’t be seen by users but can have a big impact on how search results and some site features are displayed for users. While it isn’t a direct ranking factor, correctly implemented schema can give search engines a better understanding of your page and content, which can ultimately give better organic visibility and result in higher click-through-rates (CTR).

Source: Google Search Blog.

Pagination Elements (September 2011)

To help resolve crawl and content duplication issues caused by pagination (e.g. multiple pages in product categories or blog post listings), this confirmed update introduced the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link attributes and changed the way that Google dealt with ‘View All’ pages.

Query Encryption (October 2011)

Google announced that they would start encrypting search query data for privacy reasons, which meant that SEOs and webmasters started to see ‘not provided’ when they tried to see which keywords were driving organic traffic to the website. The number of ‘not provided’ data returns ramped up over the next weeks and months, causing lots of headaches in the SEO industry.

2010 Google Updates

Google Places (April 2010)

‘Places’ pages were actually rolled out in autumn 2009 for businesses to claim and update, but were originally part of Google Maps only. This new launch in 2010 brought together the Local Business Centres listings and integrated this with Places, bringing a new dimension to local SEO for businesses with a physical presence in specific locations.

Image source: Search Engine Land

May Day (May 2010)

A confirmed algorithm change that affected long-tail traffic. It seemed to hit websites with lots of pages containing fairly thin content.

Caffeine rollout (June 2010)

After the preview in 2009 and lots of testing, Caffeine rolled out globally in 2010. This made Google faster in delivering results and the changes to crawling and indexing aimed at providing a fresher index i.e. relevant new content appeared in search results much more quickly after publication than it used to. Read what Google said about the Caffeine rollout.

Negative Reviews (December 2010)

In a story that hit the news in 2010, a retailer in the US found that all online reviews about their business (including very negative ones) actually helped them to rank higher in search engine results. This finding resulted in them deliberately giving poor service to customers because they knew it would help their online visibility. The organic search version of all publicity being good publicity. In response to this, Google launched an update to target websites that received persistently poor reviews to ensure they wouldn’t benefit in terms of ranking signals.

Social Signals (December 2010)

Google confirmed that they, along with Bing, now used social media signals as part of their ranking algorithm, including data from Facebook and Twitter.

2009 Google Updates

Vince (February 2009)

An update that seemed to positively impact big brand websites, and negatively affect less well-known brands that were previously ranking well. Google representatives played this down at the time and said that it was more about factoring trust into the algorithm for generic search queries, rather than a large tweak to their systems.

Caffeine (August 2009)

While the full Caffeine update wouldn’t roll out until the following year, this preview hinted at one of the biggest shifts to the way Google search worked so far. A huge change to infrastructure, it made crawling and indexing much more efficient and meant search rankings could be updated far more often.

2008 Google Updates

Dewey (March/April 2008)

Dewey was a change that seemed to span March and April of 2008, and was thought to be a tweak that involved Google’s internal properties, such as Google Books, although this element was never confirmed. Lots of SEOs spotted drastic shifts in search results, but no official information about the update was released by Google.

Google Suggest (August 2008)

A change to the way Google helped people search rather than an algorithmic tweak, Google Suggest introduced suggested searches in a dropdown under the search box, which populated as the user typed. This feature had been in the test phases since 2004.

Source: Search Engine Land

2007 Google Updates

Universal Search (May 2007)

The biggest update in 2007 was Universal Search, which wasn’t an algorithm change but instead a major change in the way that search listings were presented. Google search results started to blend not just websites, but also included news, videos, images, local results and even books. Previously, these had all been on separate tabs in search and users had to navigate to the right tab to see other types of listing, but now they were unified. This gave SEOs many more options for getting in front of the right audience in the SERPs.

2006 Google Updates

Supplemental update (November 2006)

The only major update in 2006 consisted of unconfirmed changes to Google’s supplemental index (introduced in 2003) and the way in which it treated filtered pages. This caused lots of confusion in the SEO industry, which didn’t really disappear until the supplemental index underwent more changes in 2007.

2005 Google Updates

In 2005 there were a lot of changes in the search optimisation industry, which were not all related to engine algorithms but hugely significant at the same time. These include the confirmed introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute for links in January, meaning that beneficial ‘link juice’ wouldn’t be passed from one website to another if the link was nofollowed. Spammy blog comments and forum posts were some of the biggest areas impacted, removing these link acquisition tactics from the SEO toolbox.

Another important change implemented in 2005 was when Google introduced a feature in Webmaster Tools (now known as Google Search Console (GSC) where webmasters or SEOs could submit XML sitemaps directly, which could help speed up the crawling and indexing of pages.

Google also rolled out their official ‘Personalised Search’ update, which meant that Google started to take the context of a user’s past search history to deliver more personalised results.

Other updates in 2005 included:

Allegra (February 2005)

This unconfirmed update correlated with some fairly dramatic ranking changes for lots of sites, and potentially penalisation for spammy links, but the details of what it included were never verified.

Bourbon (May 2005)

This confirmed update was described at the time as being ‘something like 3.5 changes in search quality’. This not entirely useful information seemed to translate as potential changes to how Google’s algorithms treated duplicate content and URLs that were non-canonical.

Jagger (October 2005)

This confirmed report seemed to target low-quality links, such as link farms, paid links and reciprocal links. The rollout of this update started in September and ran through to November, but it was during October that most impact was felt.

Big Daddy (December 2005)

With a rollout that lasted several months, Big Daddy impacted the way in which Google dealt with redirects like 301 and 302, along with URL canonicalisation and some other tech SEO issues.

2004 Google Updates

2024 was a fairly quiet year for Google search updates in comparison with the previous twelve months, but the updates that did roll out tended to have a bigger impact. These included:

Austin (January 2004)

As a follow-up to Florida’s spammy SEO tactic focus, Austin was an unconfirmed update that doubled down on things that set out to deceive either search engines or users, including the presence of invisible text on webpages (such as white text on a white background) and stuffing meta tags with keywords.

Brandy (February 2024)

Brandy was a confirmed update that introduced Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), in an attempt for Google to identify and apply more context to the terms people were using to search with (and related concepts/synonyms), in order to deliver more relevant results. Brandy also included a new focus on anchor text relevance.

2003 Google Updates

From 2023, the noticeable updates started to occur with more frequency. They included:

Boston (February 2003)

The first ‘named update’ which was confirmed and documented by Google. It was announced at a search engine marketing conference in Boston and started a big move away from Google search rewarding webpages with a high density of keywords within the content or even hidden on the page.

Cassandra (April 2003)

This unconfirmed update seemed to crack down on hidden text and links within a website, along with sites that had a large quantity of links from domains that were co-owned.

Dominic (May 2003)

Another unconfirmed update that seemed to be focused around the way that Google counted or reported backlinks.

Fritz (July 2003)

This confirmed update marked a change in Google’s approach to changing their index, turning towards an incremental update model rather than monthly, which meant index changes could be seen on virtually a daily basis.

Supplemental Index (September 2003)

This unconfirmed update marked another indexing change by Google, as the search engine started to split some results into a separate ‘supplemental’ index rather than the main one. This supplemental index was later reintegrated with the main index.

Florida (November 2003)

A fairly major confirmed update at the time, in terms of the impact it had on lots of website rankings, Florida marked the beginning of the end for lots of black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing.

2002 Google Updates

2002 was a year of big changes for Google search, and the first documented search engine algorithm update (although never officially confirmed) happened in September. This saw many websites notice big ranking changes when nothing had changed on their pages, but the specifics of what the update included or aimed for were the cause of much speculation in the SEO industry, as young as it was then.

You can take a look at some of the forum conversations about this 2002 Google search update here.

Google update recovery tips

If your website drops in organic performance and this correlates with a known Google update, it can be a worrying time for businesses and organisations that rely on search engine traffic. We’ve compiled some tips below to help you get to grips with the situation and put in place a plan for recovery.

Don’t panic

If you’re losing significant traffic and revenue due to a search engine update, it’s easy to panic and start making changes straight away. This can be counterproductive, because tweaks that you make in a rush can sometimes make things worse. It tends to be much more effective to wait until the update has finished rolling out (which sometimes takes a few weeks), reading up on what the SEO community are saying about their own experience of it, and digging into the available data for your website before you come up with a roadmap for recovery. This ensures that any strategy changes or actions that you do take are data-led rather than panic-led.

Look for patterns in your data

If Google has released confirmation of the update and its aim, it’s definitely helpful to have a think about that in the context of why your site may have been affected.

Is it specific pages or segments of your site that have been affected and lost organic visibility? Or certain types of content or pages? Comparing impressions and clicks by page in GSC with the period before the update can often highlight this.

Review your on-page elements

Now you have the quantitative data, take a qualitative look at the affected pages – what is happening on the page that could account for the impact of the update?

• Does your on-page follow best practice?
• Does your content meet the E-E-A-T framework?
• Are there any improvements that could be made to make the piece more unique and useful to the target audience?

This can be a great place to start your action plan for getting things back on track. Find out more about recovering from a Google Core Update.

If you want some help with Google update recovery or are looking for support with any aspect of your SEO strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.