Google Algorithm Updates and Changes [2020 – 2021]

By May 20, 2022

3 mins read

Google algorithms have a significant role to play in SEO and occupy a long history of updates, search index changes, and modifications that have always impacted the rankings of websites. Whether the impact is positive or negative depends upon the SEO practices (White Hat SEO or Black Hat SEO) being applied by them.

Google algorithms are complex systems that embed robust technologies to retrieve data from Google’s search index and promptly render the best results for a user query.

These systems undergo periodic modifications and come up with new updates that are obligatory to be applied by all the online websites to get genuine ranking results ranked by relevance on the SERPs (search engine results page).

Do you know?

Google search algorithms change nearly 500-600 times a year which on average is calculated as once or twice each day.

Some of them most people can recognize by the names of:

• Hummingbird
• Fred
• Pigeon
• Payday
• Intrusive Interstitials Update
• RankBrain
• Panda
• Mobilegeddon
• Penguin
• Exact Match Domain (EMD)
• Page Layout Algorithm

Now we’ll highlight some of the latest updates rolled out by Google in the years 2020 and 2021.

Google Algorithms Latest Updates

#Link Spam Update

With the update rolled out on July 26, 2021, it attempts to void spammy links across the web in whichever language they occur over the Internet network. It nullifies all the irrelevant links that tend to be considered spam.

Websites possessing such links will see a huge drop in the rankings as they do not align as per Google’s advice to be user-oriented rather incline themselves towards keyword stuffing, link manipulation, etc.

#Google Core Update

June and July 2021 witnessed two new core updates consecutively.
The July 2021 update was completed in twelve days (from 1st to 12th) having a slight variation in the entire algorithm, not specifically making a change in any single function. Websites that saw a rise or decline in their rankings can attribute the changes to this new update.

The June 2021 update was succeeded by the July 2021 update as the former was quite far-reaching and comprehensive where some of the changes they planned to disperse weren’t possibly ready.

Despite this, many websites felt the impact via a modified SEO ranking.

#Google Page Experience Update

With this update, Google began to officially consider user experience as one of the major aspects to position websites on SERPs. Google started to put it into practice after May 2021 and most probably is expected to be completed by August 2021.

Google Page Experience Update marks a revolution in ranking websites based on the experience they deliver to the end-user. Google scans some factors while deciding to rank a website, some of them include:

• Load time of web pages
• The bounce rate of web pages
• Web Page formatting and navigation
• Content length and quality
• Use of multimedia
• Mobile-friendliness
• Usage of ads
• And many others

[Related Read:“What is a good user experience as per Google?”]

#Google Product Reviews Update

People appreciate genuine and explanatory product reviews. Being mindful of the fact, Google launched this new search ranking algorithm update (in April 2021) that aims to reward in-depth and rich content in product reviews.

Though it’s separate from the regular code updates, it primarily focuses on delivering users quality content that provides insightful analysis and original research and is shared by experts who know the topic/context well.

#Google Passage Ranking

This update went live in February 2021 estimating that a website’s positioning can be influenced by the Google Passage Ranking update to an extent of 7%. The algorithm that runs behind the update is based on passage indexing that helps the search engine extract content buried in a passage or web content that can answer a user query.

Along with indexing web pages, now individual passages can also be indexed by simply understanding the relevancy of the passage.

#Google Core Update (2020)

The last major update of 2020 impacted websites and SEO across all languages. Many times even if there is nothing major to update on a website, still rankings get affected that indicates towards checking out the release of any Google core update.

#Google BERT Expands

The BERT expansion was an update in the BERT’s algorithm that allowed search engines to process all the search results in English on a site. It happened in October 2020, where earlier the BERT algorithm was only powered to process 10% of the search results on a website.

Although, it did not impact the SEO directly; however, was considered significant in Google’s ever-improving accuracy.

#Featured Snippet Deduplication

This update, released in January 2020, ensured that webpages in a featured snippets position will not be repeated in Page 1 organic listings and ultimately, affected 100% of all search listings.

Google is Always Working on its Updates and Changes!

Is your marketing team checking up with these ever-changing updates and modifications to keep up with the latest techniques that influence your website optimization?

If not, allow CodeGlo’s Digital Marketing professionals to guide you over all the older and recent Google updates and assist you in the best practices to follow to keep your online business streamlined with the Google guidelines.

The ultimate goal is to make users happy and satisfied, and this is what we have been helping businesses to do for a prolonged time now. Try us, Believe us.
Get in touch with us now!