Google Algorithm Updates

There are a number of algorithm update logs available online.

We don't aim to be the most comprehensive, but rather to highlight some of the more important changes in terms of their impact on the field of SEO. Some of the larger & more impactful updates are in bold.

2003

Florida Update: November 16th ... this is when SEO first got complex enough to where some people started needing the help of external experts. Google rolled out this huge update while they were still powering Yahoo! Search & before Yahoo! switched to their own in-house search algorithm.

2005

• Nofollow launched: January 18th ... Google would later shift the purpose of this tag from fighting blog comment spam to something which should be required on any paid links
• Search personalization: June 28th ... websites you visit regularly may be ranked higher in the search results. later on Google would further enhance personalization by increasingly localizing the search results, both within a particular country and down to the city level. in 2014 Google even started going more granular like down to the neighborhood level in some larger cities.

2007

Universal Search: May 16th ... Google mixes in YouTube, news & other vertical search types into their core index. later they add their knowledge graph and a variety of paid-only verticals in areas like hotel search, flight search, financial products, product/shopping search.

2008

Google Suggest: August 25th ... this auto-completes user search queries after they start typing their search query, which attempts to drive them down well worn paths, further minimizing traffic sent to misspellings and some lesser searched for longtail phrases. 

2009 

Vince Update: February 20th ... this is where we started the whole "brand, brand, brand" stuff. note this happened *after* the financial crisis, when Google's revenue growth stagnated & Google share prices plunged. March of 2009 was the bottom of the stock market plunge, when congress pushed FASB to allow for widespread accounting games by relaxing mark-to-market requirements.

2010 

Google Instant: September 8th ... made Google suggest the default search behavior.

2011

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011, impacts 12% of queries, US & English only.
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later) impacted about 2% of queries, incorporated user block signal, hit eHow & was rolled out internationally in the English language.
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later) allegedly improved scraper detection (though Google has still asked for help on this front)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later) rolled out to foreign languages with the exception of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. impacted 6% to 9% of search queries.
  
  • Google analytics changes (that further obfuscated some data)
    
    • July 28th - Google blended image traffic in core search traffic by default. Previously they were seen as separate traffic sources.
    • August 11th - changed session handling, which increased visit counts while offsetting that with lowering time on site metrics, higher bounce rates, and such.
• August 24th: (about 2 weeks later) not an official update, but a number of folks here that were using the subdomain work-around for a few weeks to a month or so saw their sites whacked on the 24th.
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 10 weeks since August 12 update)
  
  • general update notes
    
    • some sites that were hit saw improvements, some sites that had recovered (like Daniweb.com) were once again re-hit.
    • using subdomains, HubPages had recovered over 100% of their Panda-related traffic loses.
    • YouTube was yet again another big winner.
    
    
  • this was the first Panda update where Google issued a weather report for future updates
    
    • On October 4th there was flux / 2.5.1 ... after publicly complaining about being hit again Daniweb recovered once again (along with some other large sites), showing how responsive Google is to public relations issues.
    • On October 13th there was another round / 2.5.2
    • On October 18th/19th there was another round / 2.5.3
• Panda 2.6/3.0: November 18th, 2011
• Panda 3.1: December 13th & Panda 3.2 December 19th (smaller/minor updates)

2012

• Panda 3.2 January 16th to 22nd - claimed to be folding data in rather than an algorithm update
• Ad Heavy Update January 19th
• Panda 3.4 March 23rd
• Panda 3.5 April 19th
• Penguin update April 24
  
  • notice how Panda updates were included tightly on either side of this to make the weekly "what changed" SEO services have many changes appear all at once so that it is harder to isolate variables & impacts.
    
• Panda 3.6 April 27th
• Penguin 2 / 1.1 May 25th
• Panda 3.7 June 8th
• Panda 3.8 possibly June 25th
• July 17th Japanese & Korean Panda update
• Panda 3.9 July 24th
• Panda 3.91 August 20th
• Panda 3.92 September 18th
• Panda 4.0 / 20 September 27th through October 3rd, 2.4% of queries impacted
• EMD Update September 28th/29th
• Penguin 3 October 5th
• Ad Heavy Update 2 October 9th
• Panda 21 November 5th
• Stealth update which hit MetaFilter November 17th
• Panda 22 November 21st
• Panda 23 December 21st

2013

• Panda 24 January 22
• Image Search interface update January 23
• Panda 25 is out & Google says they are unlikely to confirm or announce any further Panda updates. March 15
• Panda 25.1 (not announced, but likely started between May 5th & 7th)
• May: Phantom/Quality update 1
• Penguin 4 / 2.0 May 22nd, impacts 2.3% of queries
• Spammy Query Update June 11th
• Unnamed Authority Boosts: on June 26th & July 1st, Google dialed up the weighting on some signals aligned with domain authority (or, conversely, they dialed down the weighting they place on raw matching relevancy). On July 9th they dialed it back slightly.
• Panda 26 July 16 - 18...allegedly more granular
• Mobile searches as direct visits somewhat fixed: on July 29th/30th Google started showing a lot of mobile searches as keyword (not provided) where they were showing up as direct website visits in the past ... this was the leading edge of a multi-month campaign of Google's where they hid about an additional 1% daily of search traffic...driving the not provided percent from under half to about 90% in about 2 months (the included chart below is slightly lagging).
  
• Unannounced update: August 21st/22nd
• Hummingbird: extension of Google's scrape-n-displace efforts...apparently started around August 26th or perhaps September 4th (though rolling out in phases).
• Wave of manual link penalties: September 3rd/4th
• Penguin 2.1 October 4th
• unnannouced Panda refresh December 17th

2014

• 3rd Top Heavy Page Layout algo update: February 6th
• Spammy Query algo update 2.0: weekend of May 17th, impacts 0.3% of queries to a noticeable degree (the original version launched)
• Panda 4.0 May 20th, impacts 7.5% of English language queries to a noticeable degree. the original Panda impacted 11.8% of English language queries to a noticeable degree.
• Spammy Query algo update 3.0: launched on June 12th, this one is claimed to impact spammy sites whereas the prior version was claimed to focus more on spammy queries.
• June 22nd: unannounced Panda update
• Pigeon local search update: July 24th
• August 27th / 28th: unannounced Panda update
• September 25th through first week of October, though some saw movement on the 21st: Panda 4.1 update impacting 3 to 5% of search queries.
• October 17th: Penguin 3.0, though there was an overlapping Panda update used to mask it. The refresh affected under 1% of US English queries.
• November 27th: continuation of Penguin 3, with more recoveries.
• December 18th: Pigeon update rolled out to Canada, Australia & the UK.

2015

• January 24th: David Naylor believes Google may have rolled out a mobile-friendly related ranking factor then.
• March 16th:  on March 16th Brian White announced Google would soon roll out a doorway page update.
• Mobile Friendly Design Update April 21st: Google announced on February 26th that Google will launch a mobile-ranking update on April 21st. The algorithm will be applied in real-time & have a page-level impact. While the 21st was referenced as the day of the update, many people did not see any significant changes until a day or two later & the update was scheduled to roll out over the following week. For as heavily hyped as the update was, it has fairly minimal impact on search traffic.
• April 28th & May 3rd: unnanounced update, which some people thought was associated with Panda. Google claimed there was "no update" but informed SEOs looking at the SERPs noticed a significant change. Glenn Gabe & HubPages' Paul Edmondson wrote about the change, which Google later confirmed as a "quality" update. This update was also called Phantom 2.

  I found an example of a traditional Panda hit. And it's HUGE. ~85% decrease, starting on 4/28. Holy smokes #seo pic.twitter.com/RaLPNmRv3o

  — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 4, 2015

• June 16th: an update appeared to extend some of the impacts of query deserves freshness (QDF)
• July 19th - ?: Panda 4.2 is slowly rolling out over the course of many months, with some biweekly data refreshes lasting through September.
• September 16th: Phantom/Quality update 3
• ~ Octover 5th: Google updated their display of search results for some keywords commonly targeted by hackers to show fewer organic results on the first page.
• November 19th: Phantom 3 (see here or here)

2016

• January ~ 8th - 11th: update to the core ranking algorithm
• Feb 23: Google shifted from showing up to 8 right rail textads & up to 3 top ad units to showing no right rail ads (unless they are shopping ads) and showing up to 4 ad units at the top of the search results. Around the same time Google announced they were shutting down their Google Compare / Google Advisor vertical shopping comparison service which operated in markets like credit cards, mortgage rates and insurance. A couple days later Google added more whitespace between the search results to further push the organic results below the fold.
• March 3, 14 & 21: adjustments which appear to be related to phantom updates (thus related to search quality / Panda).
• May 11: mobile friendly update 2.0 now live.
• June: Phantom/Quality update #4
• July 26: broad roll out of Google AdWords expanded text ads, which further displace organic results by pushing them below the fold on more devices.
• September 1st: local update
• September 2 (ongoing throughout month): likely a quality update, either new singal reweighting or a quite major data refresh. (I believe this was them testing Penguin 4).
• September 20: Google AMP live in mobile search results in categories beyond news.
• September 23: Penguin 4.0 live. real-time updates & more granular impacts rather than sitewide hits.
  
  

  @randfish Incredibly important point is the devaluing of links & not "penalization". That's huge. Knocks negative SEO out. @dannysullivan

  — Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 23, 2016

• November 10 & 18: tested update which was rolled back
• ...

2017

• January 10: mobile interstitial usage ranking demotion

Other Algorithm Update Lists

Here are a few third party algorithm update lists & tools...

• Bronco.co.uk: Google Update Calendar
• VisualSoft - an interactive infographic going back to 2003
• Moz - a fairly comprehensive listing
• RankRanger - similar to the Moz page
• Sistrix - a more limited timeline
• Maria Haynes
• Panguin Tool - Google Analytics overlay. there's another quick penalty analysis tool here
• Dave Davies put together a 3 part retrospective on the history of search via Matt Cutts: 2000-2005, 2006-2010, & 2011-2014

Search Flux Monitors

These are tools which use a seed set of keywords and compare today's search results against yesterday's results & then compare how much the recent change has been against the typical daily churn.

• Mozcast - one of the more popular flux monitor tools. Contains metrics for SERP diversity and domain name related measurements. They also show some of the current layout shifts being tested here.
• AdvancedWebRanking - overlay launched in 2014. offers US, UK & DE information. They also offer a CTR curve.
• Serpmetrics
• RankRanger has both a SERP flux tracker and a SERP feature tracker
• Algaroo
• Ayima Pulse
• Accuranker Grump
• SERP.watch
• SEOWetter.de

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