A beginner’s guide to Google’s greatest hits: Algorithm updates and key milestones.

2024 Algorithm Updates

Google’s continuous algorithm improvements in 2024 targeted spammy content, refined AI-driven ranking signals, and further prioritised user-centric content, highlighting the importance of a balanced, holistic SEO strategy.

2023 Core Algorithm Updates

Several updates throughout 2023 continued to refine how Google ranks websites, with a focus on E-A-T signals, relevant content, and a deeper emphasis on AI-driven algorithms.

2022 Helpful content update

Google began rewarding helpful, high-quality content while demoting content deemed primarily for ranking purposes rather than user value.

2021 Page experience update

This update brought more emphasis on overall user experience, including mobile usability, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitials, affecting rankings.

2020 Core web vitals

Introduced as part of Google’s page experience update, focused on user experience, including loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, impacting ranking factors for all websites.

2019 BERT

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was introduced to improve natural language understanding, helping Google process search queries in a more human-like manner.

2018 Medic

Focused on health and medical websites, it impacted those with poor authority or trustworthiness, underscoring the importance of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for rankings.

2016 RankBrain

Aimed at improving search results, RankBrain introduced machine learning to understand queries better. It helped Google refine results for more complex and ambiguous searches.

2015 Mobilegeddon

Launched to prioritise mobile-friendly websites in search rankings, this update impacted businesses with non-responsive websites. It marked a major shift towards mobile-first indexing.

2014 Pigeon

Improved Google’s local search results by refining distance and location ranking factors, highlighting the importance of traditional SEO signals as mobile search continues to grow.

2013 Hummingbird

It was introduced to improve search result relevance by understanding user intent, especially for conversational queries, unlike older algorithms that focused on matching keywords.

2012 Penguin

This update targeted spam tactics like link buying, link networks, and keyword stuffing, impacting 3.1% of English searches. In 2014, it switched to continuous updates, and in 2016, it became part of Google’s core algorithm.

2011 Panda

Targeted thin content, high ad-to-content ratios, and other quality issues, impacting 12% of search results. Updates followed quickly, including Panda 2.0 and 3.1 the same year, and major iterations like 4.0 and 4.1 in 2014

2010 The beginning of the end for black hat SEO

A precursor to Panda, the May Day update begins to penalise sites with excessive "thin" content.

2009 Webmaster tools

Google joins Microsoft and Yahoo in support for tags which help identify canonical.
versions of sites.

2004 Spam Wars

Google's Florida update was followed the following year by Austin, algorithm changes that confirmed Google's commitment.

Click Consult Founded

2002-2003 The Algorithm

Google begins to announce a series of algorithm changes. designed to improve SERPs.

2000 The Birth of PPC

Google AdWords Launch. Unofficial motto "don't be evil" adopted.

1997 Google

The Google.com domain name is registered.

1996 Stanford University

Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on BackRub, essentially the Google 0.1.