Research, filter, and search the latest confirmed Google algorithm updates (from 2015—present).
20 Sep
Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update targets specifically English-language product reviews. It was completed on September 26th.
12 Sep
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on September 26th.
25 Aug
Helpful content updates promote more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic. This update will take up to 2 weeks to roll out.
27 Jul
Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update targets specifically English-language product reviews and was completed on August 2nd.
25 May
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on June 9th.
23 Mar
Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on April 11th.
22 Feb
Page Experience updates are designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences. This includes mobile friendliness, intrusive interstitials, safe browsing, and speed metrics referred to as Core Web Vitals. This update was completed on March 3rd.
1 Dec
Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on December 21st.
30 Nov
Local search updates focus on making local search results better for users. They are typically rebalancing factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence. This update was completed on December 8th.
17 Nov
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on November 30th.
3 Nov
Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed on November 11th.
16 Aug
This was a change to how Google writes titles for pages in the SERP. More titles are now rewritten and each page generally has one title now. Previously, titles could change depending on the query.
26 Jul
Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. As the name implies, this particular update targeted link spam. This update was completed on August 24th
1 Jul
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on July 12th.
28 Jun
Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed the same day.
23 Jun
Spam updates target sites that don't follow the webmaster guidelines. Sites impacted by these updates may be seeking short term gains while ignoring best practices. This update was completed the same day.
15 Jun
Page Experience updates are designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences. This includes mobile friendliness, intrusive interstitials, safe browsing, and speed metrics referred to as Core Web Vitals. This update was completed on September 2nd.
10 Jun
This update targets sites that may engage in predatory practices when it comes to harassing people.
2 Jun
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on June 12th.
8 Apr
Product review updates prioritize content that demonstrates first hand knowledge and expertise of the products. This update was completed on April 22nd.
10 Feb
Passage ranking helps specific passages within pages to rank better for relevant queries. This update was completed on February 15th.
3 Dec
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on December 16th.
15 Nov
Subtopic ranking helped Google to better understand relevant subtopics for some search results and show a wider range of relevant content. Date is approximate.
20 Sep
A couple separate bugs happening at the same time led to some flux in the SERPs. Mobile Indexing bug fixed October 8th. Canonical issue fixed October 14th.
10 Aug
A major bug shook up Google search results on this day. Many SEOs noticed a lot of low quality sites ranking higher. Fixed the 11th.
4 May
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was completed on May 18th.
22 Jan
This update made it so your page is only listed once in SERPs. Prior to this, a page could have the featured snippet and another organic listing.
13 Jan
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
9 Dec
BERT uses machine learning to help understand user queries better and to return more relevant results.
5 Nov
Local search updates focus on making local search results better for users. They are typically rebalancing factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence. This particular update also introduced neural matching which helps Google better understand how words are related to concepts. This update was completed on December 2nd.
22 Oct
BERT uses machine learning to help understand user queries better and to return more relevant results.
24 Sep
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
4 Jun
The Site Diversity Update makes it so that one site will rarely have more than 2 organic listings in a SERP.
3 Jun
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
5 Apr
A bug on Google's end made a lot of pages drop out of the index. This was fixed by April 10th.
12 Mar
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
1 Aug
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. Some SEOs also call this the Medic update. This update was completed on August 8th.
9 Jul
This update made it so that some of the slowest websites were not as visible in search results. There was some testing prior to this date.
16 Apr
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
26 Mar
Mobile-First Indexing was a change in how Google indexed pages. They switched from using the desktop version of pages to the mobile version. This means that content and links seen on mobile pages are what are ultimately indexed. While some sites were moved before this date, this is the date when the first big batch of websites were moved.
7 Mar
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
20 Jun
Google officially launched a search feature related to jobs.
25 Apr
Project Owl was a quality update designed to reduce offensive and misleading pages in search results.
7 Mar
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was also referred to as Fred, a nickname given to it by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes.
10 Jan
The Intrusive Interstitial Penalty targeted sites with popups that made content less accessible.
6 Oct
The hacked spam update aimed to demote hacked websites in search results.
23 Sep
Google's Penguin algorithm was made to target webspam. This update integrated Penguin with the Core algorithm. It also changed from demoting pages to a system that tries to simply ignore bad links. This update was completed on October 12th.
17 May
Google launched rich cards. These are special SERP features powered by structured data. You can see the various features in <a>the search gallery<a/>.
12 May
The second Mobile-Friendly Update increased the effect of the ranking signal. It was intended to make mobile-friendly sites rank even better.
8 Jan
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking.
17 Dec
Google started to crawl and index the HTTPS version of pages over the HTTP versions.
26 Oct
RankBrain is using machine learning to better understand search queries and return relevant results. Launched months before it was announced.
18 Jul
Panda updates aim to adjust rankings based on website quality. Panda 4.2 rolled out over several months.
1 May
Core updates involve large changes to Google's algorithm aimed to make the results better. They're generally focused on E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These updates can cause significant shifts in ranking. This update was also referred to as "The Quality Update" and "Phantom 2".
21 Apr
The Mobile-Friendly Update, also referred to as Mobilegeddon, helped to reward websites who are mobile-friendly.
17 Mar
This was a webspam update that specifically targeted doorway pages.