Google Rules and Updates
Check out what the main Google Core Updates were and why they are important to improving your site.
Google's algorithm is the program that works behind the search engines to filter and deliver information on the result pages according to each user's search and ranking factors. It is through him that the delivery of relevant content is done, showing the best results.
But for that to happen, there have already been several updates and improvements, always thinking about the best for the user.
Daily updates: Every day Google's algorithm undergoes small changes to improve results delivery processes.
Core Updates: are the main updates carried out each year on the main algorithm to generate more sudden changes in the organic results.
These changes are so big that they even get different names. Check out the main ones.
1. Florida (2003)
Remembered as Google's first major update. From it, SEO gained notoriety and filtered out at least 50% of the sites listed so far, fighting low quality sites that used bad practices, such as keyword stuffing.
2. Panda (2011)
After a few years, the Panda update affected nearly 12% of search results, penalizing sites with low quality content and lots of ads. After this update, the focus on quality content has become much greater.
3. Penguin (2012)
Penguin was known at the time as Webspam Update and was responsible for curbing over-optimizations in content, impacting approximately 3.1% of search results in English. The objective was to penalize sites that practiced keyword stuffing, pointing out if the site has low quality (or artificial) links, among other black hat SEO schemes. Black hat is the name given to bad practices (and which are subject to penalties).
This update went through several improvements and releases, until reaching version 4.0 (2016), when it officially became part of Google's algorithm and began to work in real time.
4. Hummingbird (2013)
Hummingbird was not just a change to the algorithm, but a complete overhaul of it.
In this way, the results started to be displayed based on semantics and not just keywords. This means that synonyms and the context in which the terms are inserted are also considered, as well as other complex factors, such as the user's location and previous searches.
This helps make the results more closely related to the user's search intent.
5. HTTPS/SSL Update (2014)
This update came to announce that HTTPS was becoming a ranking factor: an added incentive to make the internet safer.
This happened because websites that have SSL certificates use encrypted information, preventing the data from being identified in the middle of the path, if intercepted.
6. Mobile Friendly Update – Mobilegeddon (2015)
Called Mobilegeddon, this update started to prioritize friendly sites for search engines on mobile devices, therefore, the use of the responsive version of the site took on great importance for the sites.
7. Rankbrain (2015)
Also in 2015, Google launched Rankbrain, a system that incorporates artificial intelligence into the algorithm, which helps in the interpretation and presentation of search results.
Some experts consider RankBrain to be part of the Hummingbird search algorithm, as both are aimed at understanding and interpreting the full meaning of the sentence rather than focusing on individual words.
As a machine learning system, RankBrain is constantly self-learning. It can identify patterns in different search requests and find similarities between them. This makes search engines understand a phrase never seen before from phrases already known by the robot, thus making a correlation between the semantics.
8. Fred (2017)
The Fred update was released in 2017 to identify sites with low quality content and lots of advertising banners.
Google trend analyst John Mueller said at the time that "if you're following good SEO practices, the only reason your site is penalized is poor content quality."
9. Medical Update (2018)
This core update generated a great impact on the market by causing changes in the positioning of several websites, especially those that address issues that can directly impact people's lives, such as the YMYL category, acronym for Your Money, Your Life, issues related to health, among others. For this reason, the update was named Medical Update.
According to RD Blog, the change made it clear that the negatively impacted sites dealt with subjects written by people who had neither the profile nor the experience to do so. For example: to talk about health, it is important to have a doctor; to indicate investment options, it is important that the author has experience in this market. In summary, having content from authorities in the area makes a difference in the results. As of this change, the best-ranked content in this category became those that included the authors' complete profiles.
10. EAT (2019)
EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, a fundamental guideline for ranking.
This change makes it even clearer that the credentials and training of authors, in addition to the relevance of the companies, are directly related to the organic result of the content. Better understand each of the three factors:
Expertise: In order to have good results, it is necessary to be an expert in the field of action, that is, if you need to address a type of subject in your content, you need to understand this subject very well. For example, if you are reading about diabetes, it is better to have an expert doctor than someone who has the disease.
Authority: It needs to show that your website is an authority on the subject. If a page is a community or discussion forum, for example, the quality of the discussions is what drives authority. But make no mistake: Google knows how to determine which mentions are worthy of contributing to E-A-T and which are not, meaning that spurious comments and discussions can hurt its ranking.
The important thing is to monitor the mentions of your brand on the internet to find out how your image is doing. And from there, implement improvements in your strategy so that people talk more about your products or services.
Trustworthiness: It is necessary to show users that they can trust your site, especially when it comes to ecommerces, as they ask for personal and credit card information to make purchases, for example.
Grammatical and spelling errors are also considered reliability criteria, as a misspelled word can be a sign of poor quality. Also, do not use content with automatic translation.
It is for these reasons that the quality of content is so important to search engine rankings.
11. Trustworthiness update (2019)
It was the first update announced in advance by Google, after constant requests from the community for it.
This update is called "Trustworthiness" as it made even more clear the relevance of content quality, especially for news sites, which were most impacted by the changes at the time. In the UK, for example, The Daily Mail reported that it lost 50% of its traffic from organic searches after the update.
12. Diversity update (2019)
As of this update, sites that had different results on the first page of the SERP now have only 2 different results, at most.
This update is called "diversity", as it aimed to diversify the results, preventing higher authority sites from being able to position several positions in the top 10, making room for other domains.
13. BERT (2019)
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, a natural language processing pre-training technique based on neural networks.
Neural network technology is capable of learning human language expression forms, based on a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model called Transformer, that understands the relationships between the words in a sentence, rather than one by one in order.
In general, BERT serves to optimize and make the search system more assertive. The algorithm uses Artificial Intelligence to refine search results and deliver the best possible answers to its users, taking into account every word and phrase that was searched, including voice searches. That's because BERT uses this neural technology to improve the language users use in the search engine.
BERT is capable of using two directions: it analyzes the left and right context of the word and builds a language model with a small body of text. This brings a much deeper understanding of the relationships between words and between sentences.
Font: Search Enterprise AI
This means that the reading made by the search engine goes beyond the website page itself. And, once again, the concern is with the content it offers. So the recommendation is: write for humans and not robots! Content is extremely important to attract users and deliver the best solutions and search engines are increasingly aware of this!
But beware, BERT does not replace RankBrain. Like BERT, RankBrain also uses machine learning but does not do Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is focused on analyzing queries and grouping words and phrases together with the same semantics, but it cannot understand human language by itself.
14. Favicon and position 0 (2020)
This time we are talking about two updates!
Updating "position 0" is also known as a "featured snippet". It refers to a box of content that appears in some search results at the top of the results page. Previously, the results page featured the highlighted content and repeated it in its original position. But after this update, there is no more duplication, making the content appear only once.
The second change is related to the appearance of the results, including the ads, which has already been changed several times. Look:
Font: Search Engine Land
The intent of this update was to reflect what users already see on mobile devices, but it doesn't seem to last long, according to a Google Twitter post: “Last week we updated the look of Search on desktop to mirror what’s been on mobile for months. We’ve heard your feedback about the update. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons…”.
15. Page Experience Update - Core Update (2021)
In 2020 Google announced that the on-page experience would be inserted into the Google Search ranking and, consequently, would affect SEO.
From 2021 onwards these changes started to take hold, affecting several websites all over the world!
Updating is a guideline that prioritizes sites that offer a good user experience and punishes pages that don't fit the metrics. UX (User Experience).
Google Page Experience privileges three aspects that concern the user experience on your website pages. These metrics are known as Core Web Vitals and their main points are: loading speed, interactivity and layout stability. These points are addressed as LCP, FID and CLS.
Learn more about them in our Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights Guide.
In addition to these three most important Page Experience metrics, Google has already emphasized that Core Web Vitals will likely evolve over time. Besides, the search engine will not fail to evaluate the other indicators that were already part of the user experience. So keep in mind that Google's ratings will be based on:
- Responsiveness and compatibility with mobile devices;
- In secure browsing, with HTTPs protocols;
- In the absence of intrusive materials such as banners and popups;
- In producing relevant content.
16. May 2022
Like all Google Updates, the May 2022 Core Update is here to bring newer changes to the natural flow of the internet and improve the User Experience.
"Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone. "
Google - Wednesday, May 25, 2022
The May 2022 Core Update was made with the purpose of improving user searches, the relevance of the websites that appear, and as always, the quality.
It is normal for these updates to bring some loss or gain effects after implementation, such as ranking variation.
But it is important that your website always adheres to SEO and optimization rules.
According to Google's Official Documentation, these changes serve to improve the way systems evaluate content in general.
So, always remember to create quality content on your website! Google is focusing a lot on content in the latest Core Updates.
To learn how to create quality content, check out our guide.
Stay tuned for new updates!
It is extremely important to keep track of changes in the algorithm because, in this way, it is possible to know the reasons that are impacting the metrics.
Also, you need to understand change to adapt quickly. Knowing the updates as early as possible makes it easier to create an action plan to adapt and improve your current strategies.
Therefore, to continue generating organic traffic to your website, the best thing to do is to keep up to date and apply the best SEO practices in accordance with the updates.
Follow updates at Latest documentation updates by Google.
