Google Update Calendar

There has been reports on both traffic and keyword movements with tools and charts showing elevated levels of activity in the search engines.

Although unconfirmed, there are early reports of the update being link related.

This has been reported as a large algorithm update.

Reported a positive uplift in traffic between 10 - 15%

Featured Snippets are now considered as the first position within Google's Search Results. For websites that obtain the featured snippet for a specific query, they will no longer be present within the core search results on that page.

It is unknown as to whether this is a permanent change or if it's Google testing the water for an indefinite period of time.

Google SearchLiaison confirmed a broad core algorithm update on January 13th via Twitter.

There were reports of 60% drops in traffic, as well as 30% drops in SEO traffic.

Chatter of an update started on the 7th of November where people reported ranking movements and SERP changes.

This was later confirmed by Danny Sullivan where he mentioned this was just one update of many carried out on a weekly basis.

Google BERT was an official announced update. BERT looks at interpretations of search queries that use NLP (Natural Language Processing) to understand the context of specific words within search queries.

The aim of this update is to improve longer tail searches.

Google announced a new core algorithm update and at the same time, advised people to read up on Google’s core updates blog post. There was a lot of information around Expertise, Authority and trust in this post, suggesting that was the main focus.

This diversity update was designed to make it so that one website should have no more than two listings on the first page of the organic search results. This update should only affect listings within organic, however, all the featured snippets and knowledge graph questions will remain.

As confirmed by Danny Sullivan via Google’s Search Liaison, they pre-confirmed this update just before it happened. The June Core Update 2019 impacted websites that were falling short in trust. It was also noticed by many that brand authority became more prominent alongside possible changes to the way anchor text links are valued.

Although this wasn’t an algorithm update, we did see Google experience a large bug that caused many websites’ pages to fall out of its index. Many sites also reported traffic losses during this time.

Google Search Liaison confirmed that this core update was official and that all the elements that were changed could be found in Google’s search quality guidelines. Many people labelled this update as the “Florida 2” Update, however, it had nothing to do with the previous update. We personally saw a good uplift on YMYL sites, particularly those affected by the E-A-T update last year.

Video carousels that appear in the results pages were extended from a pack of 4 to 10 videos which are now shown as two individual columns.

Although this was never confirmed by Google, it is believed that this update was of great significance, seeing a large impact across the board. It is thought that the core focus here was general site quality, however there were also talks of link related shifts.

This was a large update that appeared to further impact a lot of websites. Websites that were affected by previous E-A-T updates saw further impacts here. People who worked on improvements to trust indicators reported seeing an uplift here.

Although unofficial, there were many reports of shake-ups following the huge E-A-T / Medic update back in August. Many websites reported changes with inverse trend, suggesting this was a correctional update.

Google rewarded websites with expertise, authority and trust. There’s also some evidence that websites that got hit earlier in this year's March “Core” update, seemed to show some signs of recovery.

Core updates are one of the few updates that seem to affect the most websites in some way and attract the most attention from website owners.

Google rolled out its mobile speed update, which has made page speed a ranking factor on mobile results. Evidence suggests that this hasn’t had any major mobile ranking shifts to pages which perform well instead it has targeted slow mobile sites.

If you have seen your page be affected by these changes and are concerned about you page speed, there are tools which can help evaluate the performance of your pages. Let us know if you want any suggestions.

This update saw Google replace the video thumbnails in its organic-like results with a dedicated video carousel, which has affected some results which had been previously tracked as organic.

Video carousels have previously been seen on mobile SERP and its integration onto desktop SERP has seen YouTube videos which ranked on page one with a video thumbnail, now not even appearing in the first 3 cards of the new carousel setup.

This has affected the visibility of some top YouTube channels and creators, however, it does offer the opportunity for other websites to rank their videos in the top organic results.

Back in November 2017, Google updated the display snippet limit up to 300 characters, they have now reverted back to the original 150-160 character limits.

Multiple tabloid newspapers have lost more than a fifth of their visibility in organic search from the latest update.

Growths made through digital first publishers and well-optimised broadsheets recorded in the UK and the US.

Google leaned towards their owned-video streaming site, YouTube. Reducing lyric sites and dictionaries to which increase the visibility of YouTube videos. There’s a 13% rise increase in visibility and search metrics score shot up to 8.2m.

Searching for definitions or lyrics, the update has found desktop users are gaining exactly what they need, instantly, via a featured snippet that pops up after the first search. This enables the user to not have to go through page after page. Search terms are: ‘define:’ and ‘[Quote] lyrics’, the update is seeing off dictionaries and lyric sites, both becoming on the breach of sinking down.

For sites that follow mobile best-practices, Google will start to use the mobile version for indexing and ranking.

Having first announced that Google will be making it’s index mobile first back in 2017, in March, they began to roll this out live by migrating sites periodically through to mobile first indexing.

Websites that acknowledged the guidelines released back in 2017 and implemented them to the website to follow mobile best practices, would benefit from this as the mobile first indexing and rankings were prioritised over the desktop.

Talk was also arising around changes to video snippets within the SERPs, which now showed more commonly for other domains and search terms.

On the 12th March, Google announced there had been a core algorithm update. Here, it was apparent that changes were seen amongst those sites that had previously suffered from historic phantom updates.

As a result, eCommerce and media publishing website were noticing the largest impacts.

Google recently made a change to provide a more descriptive/useful snippet by increasing the display snippet limit, from 150 up to 300 characters.

This change was reverted in May, 2018 and longer meta descriptions where no longer shown.

Based on your physical location Google now serves a better local result for you if your location can be determined.

With the update of Chrome 62, Google started to warn website visitors of pages with unsecured forms. This effectively tells users that any data entered onto HTTP pages are ‘Not secure’ and show security warnings on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode. Eventually, Google plans to show ‘Not Secure’ warnings for all HTTP pages even when not in Incognito mode.

Although not an algorithm update, this was an important step for Google in increasing HTTPS adoption and could have a marked effect for on-site traffic, create higher bounce rates and lower sales or conversions for those websites who are still to migrate to HTTPS.

No pattern to this update, affected dictionaries; fluctuations in mid-tier results and the continued rise of dictionary websites since February 2017.

Decline in Wikipedia SEO visibility with it no longer ranking as highly for its top keywords which have Knowledge Graph Integration. This tallies with the increase in Wikipedia's knowledge graph integrations for their top keywords.

Direct answers has seen changes with text content from one url and an image from another.

Numerous webmaster reports widespread across the whole of the SEO community sparked assumptions of a large update, also reflected through Google tracking tools. Jokingly, Google’s Gary Illyes labelled the update “Fred” however an official name was never announced.

As a result of this UnConfirmed update rolling, we did see large positive and negative shifts across a wide range of keywords in different Niches.

Shifts in Google’s search landscape were reported as early as February 1st, however, reports continued to arise with the majority of webmasters seeing large fluctuations in visibility and rankings around the 6th/7th February.

There hasn’t been any clear evidence to specify whether this ranking update was indeed an individual update, or whether it was numerous ranking updates being rolled out within a small period of time.

Starting with a few scattered reports of SERP movement, it became apparent that there was a larger scale flux in rankings and traffic which looked to run for at least 5 to 6 days.

There is speculation that there were numerous updates over this one time, with anecdotal evidence of at least 2.

Google warned webmasters that the interstitial penalty was coming, and on January 10th. Five months after their initial heads up, it rolled out, punishing aggressive interstitials and pop-ups that ran the risk of ruining the mobile experience. Many SEOs reported that the impact was minimal.

Although never officially announced, massive organic fluctuations were seen December 14- 15. Despite much chatter of SEO forums where big drops were seen, Google kept quiet.

Numerous algorithm trackers flagged high activity in Google on November 10th with no announcement of an update occurring. Chatter across the industry was highly active during this period, along with November 18th which saw a similar impact in the SERPS.

There have been rumours that the initial update on the 10th was then reversed on the 18th November, however, this has not been confirmed.

After the initial rollout in late September, the secondary rollout experienced by many webmasters saw a reversal of all penalties accrued by businesses back when the last update rolled out, over 2 years ago.

That said, it may have taken over 2 weeks for the algorithm to fully deploy, that of which affecting sites around the world. It is still unclear, however, if this was actually Google Penguin, or whether another update was rolled out at a similar time.

Following a long 2-year wait and the announcement of Penguin 4.0 on the 23rd December 2016, We started to see the rollout of the real time algorithm, that checks links on the fly and uses a point scoring to devalue links instead of penalising websites as a whole. This meaning, specific pages of a website could be held back.

Google announced Penguin was rolling out as part of their core algorithm - this is across all languages and countries and would be in real-time.

A large decrease in rankings across the board, sparking rumours of the fourth Phantom update was reported in late June / early July. Phantom, from past updates, has been mentioned to assess the quality and user intention.

Following a study carried out by Searchmetrics, common themes for this update were poor quality domains, keywords that don't correspond with pages, pages lacking in design and content and large amounts of 404 errors.

Over the third weekend in January, there were numerous reports from many webmasters seeing large fluctuations in Google's SERPS. With a Penguin update rumoured to be rolled out in the first quarter of this year, many jumped to the conclusion that this was indeed Penguin

This has since been confirmed by Google that the update was in fact, further core algorithm updates to those that we experienced earlier in January of this year.

Lots of ranking movements have been reported following shake ups in the SERPS over the weekend and through to Monday morning with algorithm timeline tracking tools reporting similar findings.

Although there has been no official confirmation from Google, there were initial assumptions that the fluctuations recorded were early effects of a new Penguin update. It has been confirmed by Gary Illyes that this was not Penguin.

All changes recorded infact lead to what is heavily rumoured to have been a search quality update.

Google confirmed via a post on the webmaster central blog that they are adjusting their indexing system to look for more pages with a HTTPS certificate. What this now means that if there is a HTTP and HTTPS version of the same page ranking in Google's search results, Google will automatically prioritise the HTTPS versions. In order to determine the priority, the following are taken into consideration:

• It doesn't contain insecure dependencies.
• It isn't blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
• It doesn't redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
• It doesn't have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page.
• It doesn't contain a noindex robots meta tag.
• It doesn't have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
• The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn't list the HTTP version of the URL
• The server has a valid TLS certificate.

Google also state that although their systems prefer and prioritise the HTTPS versions by default, you can assist in helping make this clearer to the search engine by redirecting HTTP to HTTPS anyway.

With an early shake up within the search engine results being accredited by website owners as relevant to the Google Panda rolling update, larger movements were recording in SERP tracking tools such as MozCast and Algoroo.

Initial insight seemed to point towards Google Penguin being rolled out, however we discovered that the Penguin algorithm is still not ready to be rolled out.

As it stands at the moment, the movement seems to be more relative to a core algorithm update following comments from Google's Gary Illyes.

Website owners begin to see movement within the Google search engine rankings, however Google remain tight lipped about any possible reason for the shifts which span over 14th/15th October.

Information surrounding the sites that saw impact seem to point towards the changes being related to the rolling Google Panda update but Google have not confirmed this.

Organic search result fluctuations are speculated to be the latest Google Panda update being rolled out, however Google are still to confirm that this was actually the case.

Google's Gary Iylles uses Twitter to share an image of a plate with a panda featured on the design, adding "Pandas. Pandas Everywhere."

Reports of ranking increases and drops within the webmaster community leading all to believe that update has been actioned.

Google confirm that they rolled out their latest Google Panda update after 10 months pass since the last confirmed release back in September 2014.

While confirming that the update was rolling, it was also pointed out that impact on this date will have been very little due to the speed at which the update will roll out throughout the search results, taking months to complete.

Google confirm that the movement within their search engine results did happen due to an update, however it was not Panda, Penguin or HTTPS related. Instead it was based on a core update that they had undertaken.

Although the update has now been confirmed, Google also again mentioned that Google Panda would be running soon.

Google initially deny that they have updated anything to do with Google Panda or Penguin and stressed that there were no changes to the way that they dealt with spam, however 19th May 2015 it is revealed that Google have now said that the ranking changes seen from this date throughout the start of the month were to do with a core algorithm change that focuses on the way that they process quality signals.

This update was previously referenced as being a 'Phantom' update, however now we know what it focuses around that name no longer applies.

Google releases pre-announced mobile friendly update which focuses on mobile search queries.

Speculation that Google could potentially be using a secondary index circulated however not confirmed.

Update failed to return instant shake up to the levels claimed, however there were claims that there could be a slower roll out of the changes that could take a couple of weeks.

Google announced a new algorithm update which will use information on indexed apps as a ranking factor. This update uses Google's app-indexing to track people signed in on their mobile device (currently android phones) to determine the ranking. They have also claimed that content may surface from indexed apps.

Online community reports seeing ranking movements and speculate towards the cause of the changes. Google later comments on the changes by saying that it was not related to Google Panda or Penguin.

Discussion surrounding potential Penguin movement within the search engine results after claims that previously affected sites had seen a ranking recovery, sparking conversation about whether this was a refresh of the algorithmic update.

This was later discovered to have been confirmed by Google as still part of Google Penguin 3.0 rollout which is still operational at the minute, although no end date has been signalled.

Rumours that Google Panda could have been refreshed with website owners seeing both recovery and losses based on their website.

Google's John Mueller confirms in a Webmaster Help video that the last run of Panda data was done in October and that he was unaware of any real time update stance for the Panda algorithm.

If correct, update happened between two other algorithm roll outs within the same month.

Google reported to have rolled out an update to their Pirate update which was first seen in 2012.

Google announce that Google Penguin refresh has taken place, with it set to be a long, worldwide roll out.

Update also referred to as Penguin 3.0 in some media.

Google announce Panda 4.1 to roll out slowly, stating that they expect it to complete its process “sometime next week”.

Google announce that they have now removed authorship from their organics, claiming that they now know that it was not as helpful as they first thought. As part of the update, they also revealed that they would no longer process authorship related mark-up.

There seems to have been a Google algorithm update maybe Panda maybe SSL, but Google will not comment on this one.

Google announced that they will now be counting HTTPS sites as a ranking signal, initially it will affect 1% of search queries, but they do hint at plans to make this stronger over time.

Google updated local search pushed live in the U.S.

Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results. This could be game changing for older sites.

Google started removing posts from their search results in the EU for particular queries after the recent EU ruling.

John Mueller announced on the 25th June that they were going to remove the profile photo and circle count from the SERPs, this appeared to take place on the 28th June.

Matt Cutts announced at SMX Advanced that they would be launching the PayDay 3.0 update.

A new Panda update was released, a lot of sites were affected (both positively and negatively). Ebay was hit massively by this Panda update.

March saw more unnatural link warnings hitting websites.

The page layout update was created to target websites which had a large number of adverts above the fold.

In January a number of sites received a sitewide penalty, knocking them out for their brand name.

Google reduced the number of queries that showed authorship in the SERPS.

Hummingbird is an algorithmic update that is focused towards the detection of important terms within a search query and trying to return the most relevant results based on conversational query strings, producing results that contain what Hummingbird deems to be essential to your search.

Google updated the SERPS to include in-depth articles, for users that need a broad understanding of a topic.

Knowledge Graph showing against queries increase 50.4% according to Moz.

This Panda update was more refined, as a result some websites saw an improvement without making changes to their website.

July 2013 saw another round of unnatural link warnings.

Matt Cutts tweeted out about a multi-week update going out from 21st June.

The Payday Loan update was created to target particularly spammy niches such as porn, payday loans (hence the name), viagra etc.

Matt Cutts talked about the new domain clustering feature in a Google Webmasters video on YouTube.

Google sent out a large amount of unnatural link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools during May 2013

Confirmed at SMX West

Many people saw unnatural link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools during February 2013

Around 1.2% of English queries affected.

Around 1.3% of English search queries affected.

Google enabled the Knowledge Graph for more languages and added extra functionality.

0.8% of search queries affected in English.

It was announced that this algorithm was here to stay and that the data would be refreshed on a monthly basis. Around 1.1% of English queries affected.

October 2012 saw the release of the long awaited Disavow Tool, which Bronco actually beta tested.

0.7% of English queries affected.

0.3% of English queries affected.

Google announced in October that they'd made 65 changes to search in August and September 2012.

This update affected low quality sites with domain names that matched certain key phrases.

2.4% of English queries were affected.

Less than 0.7% of queries affected.

1% searches noticeably affected.

Google changed some search queries to have 7 results instead of the default 10.

Google started taking into consideration the number of successful DMCA requests that are submitted against a site in it's search rankings.

Google wrote a post in early August that they had made 86 search quality changes in June and July 2012.

Around 1% of searches affected.

Debunked by Matt Cutts

Around 1% of queries affected globally.

1% of queries affected.

Google announced in early June that they had made 39 search quality changes in May 2012.

A Penguin refresh affecting less than 0.1% of English queries.

Google updated the SERPs with the Knowledge Graph.

Google confirmed in early May that they had made 52 changes to search during April 2012.

Penguin was launched, Google's webspam update, affecting 3.1% of English queries and changing the way companies acquire links forever. Penguin is a link based algorithm update that targeted sites with a high number of low quality links or an unnatural link profile.

Matt Cutts confirmed on Google+ that they had a bug which treated some domains as parked domains, when they weren't.

Google wrote about the 50 changes they had made during March 2012.

Around 1.6% of search queries affected.

March 2012 saw many unnatural link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools.

At the end of February, Google wrote a blog post detailing the 40 search quality changes they had made during February 2012.

There were 40 difference changes made in February 2012, one of which was codenamed "Venice" which changed many types of keywords to show local search results. This is our best estimate based on client data we have access to.

Google posted on the Official Google Search Blog during the first week of February regarding the 17 changes they had made during January 2012.

This update affected around 1% searches globally and focused on websites that don't show content above the fold.

Google started integrating Google+ with it's search results, including the later to be remove Google authorship profiles.

In January 2012 Google announced a number of changes they had made during December 2011, see their blog post for more details.

Affects less than 1% of searches.

This update focused on giving more up-to-date results for recent events/hot topics, recurring events and queries were the content updates frequently.

This Panda update ran over a number of weeks starting on the 5th October 2011.

In this update Panda was rolled out across all languages.

The second Panda update, this time rolled out globally, ehow.com got hit hard on this one.

This was the first Panda update, which was originally known as Farmer by the SEO community. Mahalo.com was hit hard. Panda works by adjusting a website's ranking according to various on-page quality factors.

The first round of unnatural link warnings go out.