Recently Google had shaken a bit of SEO and Digital Marketing Folks with their HCU update but the dust settled in a few weeks. Now it has again launched a new set of Core Search Update. Elizabeth Tucker Director, Product Management at Google put out a new post that talked about Reducing low-quality, unoriginal results, and Keeping more spam out of your results which involved Scaled content abuse, Site reputation abuse and Expired domain abuse.
Whether or not this update does any major shift in search engine optimization landscape or changes how people were putting up tons of content articles using ChatGPT and other LLMs, Here are 10 major search-related updates that Google has made in the last 10 years, and how they have impacted Google search and the SEO industry:
1. Panda Update (2011): This update was designed to penalize low-quality content farms and reward high-quality sites with original, relevant content. The impact on SEO was significant, as many sites that relied on low-quality content saw a drop in rankings.
2. Penguin Update (2012): This update targeted link schemes and manipulative link building tactics, with the goal of improving the quality of search results. The impact on SEO was significant, as many sites that had engaged in manipulative link building practices saw a drop in rankings.
3. Hummingbird Update (2013): This update was designed to improve Google’s ability to understand the context and intent behind search queries, rather than just matching keywords. The impact on SEO was significant, as it required SEOs to focus on creating high-quality, user-focused content that answered specific questions and addressed user needs.
4. Mobile-Friendly Update (2015): This update was designed to improve the mobile search experience by prioritizing mobile-friendly sites in mobile search results. The impact on SEO was significant, as sites that were not mobile-friendly saw a drop in mobile search rankings.
5. RankBrain (2015): This update was designed to use machine learning algorithms to better understand search queries and provide more relevant results. The impact on SEO was significant, as it required SEOs to focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that addressed user needs and answered specific questions.
6. Possum Update (2016): This update was designed to diversify local search results and prevent spammy or manipulative tactics from impacting local search rankings. The impact on SEO was significant, as it required SEOs to focus on creating high-quality, locally-relevant content and building local citations.
7. Fred Update (2017): This update was designed to target sites that violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, particularly those that were ad-heavy or had low-quality content. The impact on SEO was significant, as many sites that relied on aggressive advertising or low-quality content saw a drop in rankings.
8. Mobile-First Indexing (2018): This update was designed to prioritize mobile versions of sites in Google’s index, in order to improve the mobile search experience. The impact on SEO was significant, as sites that were not mobile-friendly or had poor mobile usability saw a drop in rankings.
9. BERT Update (2019): This update was designed to improve Google’s ability to understand natural language processing and provide more relevant results for conversational queries. The impact on SEO was significant, as it required SEOs to focus on creating high-quality, conversational content that answered specific questions and addressed user needs.
10. Page Experience Update (2021): This update was designed to prioritize sites that provide a positive user experience, including factors such as mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitials. The impact on SEO was significant, as sites that did not meet these criteria saw a drop in rankings.
11.September 2023 helpful content update: With the September 2023 update, Google introduced a new and improved classifier that it claimed was better at detecting and penalizing content that is not helpful or user-friendly. As a result, content that was primarily created for SEO purposes or that provides a poor user experience has been most affected by the update. Google’s focus on prioritizing high-quality, user-centered content has never been more important for websites that want to rank well in search results.
12: March 2024 core update & March 2024 spam update: Google has recently announced two significant updates for 2024: the March Core Update and a spam update. The March Core Update represents a major advancement in how Google evaluates the usefulness of content, with a focus on promoting high-quality, relevant information. Meanwhile, the spam update aims to tackle persistent forms of spam that have been plaguing the platform, ensuring that users are presented with the most reliable and trustworthy search results.
These are just a few examples of the many updates and changes that Google has made to its search algorithm and ranking factors over the past decade. While some recommendations or best practices have changed over time, the overarching goal of Google’s algorithm remains the same: to provide the most relevant, high-quality, and useful results to users. That’s their line but the pros in SEO industry know it very well, which ones of those updates did make any major impact if act all.