Google Update is a term used to define algorithm changes, filters, data refreshes or other alterations that affect the website to drop in ranking or SEO visibility.

Google’s primary goal is to always keep the consumer happy. For which it constantly makes thousands of changes every year to its algorithm.

Most of these updates are so slight that they go completely unnoticed as Google doesn’t officially make an announcement of it’s updates. But the major ones directly affect the ranking of your website.

Google algorithms are a complex system that retrieves data from a search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. A combination of these algorithms and other ranking parameters are used by the search engine to rank a web page in the SERPs.

The general aim of these updates is to improve the relevance and quality of the search results, focusing on one or more particular features, like optimization to fight search engine spam or to combat duplicate content.

 

Major Updates of the decade

Some of the major updates that have now become the core of Google’s algorithm are-

Panda to run regular site checks for content duplication, low-quality content, thin content, keyword stuffing, content farming, lack of authority & trustworthiness, low UGC and high ad-to-content ratio.

Penguin to monitor keyword stuffing and link schemes. Link schemes are related to the development, acquisition or purchase of backlinks from low-quality or unrelated websites in an attempt to manipulate Google crawlers and attain high rankings.

Hummingbird pays attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query, sentence or conversation or it’s meaning is taken into account, rather than particular words.
It is designed to apply a meaning to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to knowledge graph facts, which may bring back better results.

Pigeon running connects local algorithm deeply to traditional web algorithm, calculate local businesses’ distance & location and 3-packs local business listings.
It emphasizes on traditional & organic signals, hyper-local content, local SEO basics, and spam reporting.

Rank-Brain uses machine learning to determine the most relevant results to search engine queries. This algorithm applies the location of the searcher, personalization, and the words of the query to determine the searcher’s true intent.
It counts more on the freshness and depth of the content and combining similar phrases and their associated URLs into a single piece of thorough content.

Fred targets black-hat tactics tied to aggressive monetization. This includes an overload on ads, low-value content, and little-added user benefits.
It affected websites with a large presence of deceptive ads, content with ads or affiliate & industry-specific sites, thin content, UX barriers, mobile problems, aggressive affiliate setups, and aggressive monetization.

 

2018 Updates-

For the year 2018, the Google SEO updates and algorithm changes are as follow-

 

Update: August 2018

This update is introduced so that marketers create great content. It points out to refer to the Quality Raters’ Guidelines (QRG) to determine what Google considers to be high quality.
This update has mainly affected

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sites
Many sites in the diet, nutrition, and medical device niches.
Large sites with changes in multiple locations across the country have dropped in rankings in favor of smaller and locally based businesses.

Some steps you can take if this update has affected your business are-

Improve your business popularity. You can often do this by getting news article submitted on your site. But, Google is pretty good at knowing which parts of sites are written by journalists and which ones are paid off. So don’t try to spam Google and risk your credibility.

Take a good hard look at your products. If you sell a product that could be considered sketchy, spammy or harmful to people, then your ranking will drop or in the worst case, Google will ban your business.

Build up product E-A-T. If you sell a diet product, a medical device, or some other health-related product, then there needs to be extensive information on the web about this product.

 

Update: April 2018

This update has to do more with content relevance. Google adjusted the rankings to ensure searchers continue to get results that best answer their queries.

If your rankings got affected by this update, it’s not necessarily an indication that the quality of your content needs to be improved. Rather, it’s more of a sign that your content needs to be more relevant to the audience who lands on your website.

 

Update: 24 July 2018

Security is one of the core principles of Google since the beginning. Google has constantly been working to keep the consumers safe as they browse the web. With this update, Chrome marks all the plain HTTP sites as “not secure.”

If your business ranking got affected by the update, consider to upgrade your website to HTTPS URLs and be secure. Even if your site does not ask for payment information, logins or other private information switching to HTTPs will show evident results.

Another July update was the mobile speed update that affected the slowest mobile sites. It applied the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page.

If this update affected your ranking, consider making incremental improvements to your site so that there are big impacts on speed.

 

Update: June 2018

This update replaces the video thumbnails with a desktop carousel. The video carousel box gives searchers a way to click and toggle through more than just three videos by clicking on the right arrow on the last video on the right of the box.
The video thumbnails had fallen to the point where they appeared on just .8% of all page one SERPS, with a 92% loss.

 

Update: May 2018

In this update, the snippet length decreased in comparison with what was in December. Now, there is no fixed length for snippets. Length varies based on what systems deem to be most useful. Google will not state a new maximum length for the snippets because the snippets are generated dynamically.

 

Update: March 2018

Mobile first indexing was announced by Google which moved a large number of sites to mobile first indexing. In this process, Google used the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help the primarily mobile users find what they were looking for.

Another March update called as Zero-result SERPs shows zero search results for some types of specific use cases. Zero results search pages are search results where there is simply an answer in the answer box or featured snippet style, with zero organic search results on the page.

 

Conclusion

Google might send out a hundred and thousand of updates throughout the year. As there is no official announcement of these updates, the only thing you can do is stay updated with all the latest trends so that you don’t miss out on anything and keep your website in mo accordingly.

Do you have any update that could make up to this list? Please share in the comments.