To a normal user, Google is just a search engine which displays the search results for the keywords he has searched. But an SEO expert will understand the seriousness of what happens when a user presses “enter” for his search.
An SEO expert’s job begins and ends during the time period between the second the user presses the enter button and the second search results are displayed. Within this time period, an SEO expert has to ensure that the search engine displays his brand on the result page. Failing to do so would cost the inflow of customers which no brand could bear.
Over the time period, SEO experts across the world have learnt the art of convincing the Google engine to display their brand on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) when the user uses a particular set of Keywords. However the past few years Google has upped its game by introducing various algorithms to ensure the quality of the results that are displayed on SERP.
While initially google made only a few or minor updates to its algorithms. However, once brands started realising the worth of digital marketing Google decided to bring in those updates to its algorithms so as to ensure the quality of results that the user consumes. As a result, Google has made numerous changes to its algorithm in the past few years. These set of algorithms had cost many companies their hard-earned profits. Hence it becomes the duty of an SEO professional to look out for new algorithms which the search engine giant might release.
Listed below is a timeline of 10 major updates which Google has released recently.
May 2020 Core Update
May 2020 Core Update. On 4th May 2020, Danny Sullivan announced the release of a major core update through his twitter handle.
This core update resulted in some major fluctuations with rankings on industries like Travel, real estate and health.
Even some major sites like Spotify, Linkedin, NYPosts etc saw a dip in their rankings due to this core update.
January 22, 2020, Core Update
Featured snippet deduplication update. This update was rolled out to target the featured snippet position in a webpage. According to this update, the featured snippet position can no longer be repeated in regular page organic listing. The update’s impact was felt across all search listings worldwide. This update caused noticeable traffic fluctuations across the automotive and finance industries.
January 13, 2020, Core Update
January 2020 Core Update. This broad core updated significantly impacted the search results of almost all major industries and businesses worldwide. Though this update wasn’t as worst as the August 2018 update, it came pretty close, due to the set back it created. Health sector and the beauty & personal care sector paid a huge price due to this update.
December 9, 2019, update
BERT rollout. While the initial BERT update targetted only US English search queries, on December 9, 2019, Google decided to roll the BERT update for 70 other languages worldwide. This update may see impacts like an increase in the quality of search traffic and improvement in the international featured snippet.
