This year, we’ve had 10 algorithm updates announced and/or confirmed by Google. Every year, there are an unknown number of unconfirmed updates, most of which have a moderate impact on rankings or such a small impact they’re barely distinguishable from regular movement in the SERPs.
However, this year, three unconfirmed updates each had a major impact on results so we’re including all 10 confirmed updates and the three unconfirmed that shook things up this year:
- Passage indexing (Feb 10): Google starts ranking passages from web pages for very specific queries, affecting 7% of searches worldwide.
- *Featured Snippet drop (19 Feb): A 40% drop in Featured Snippet impressions with YMYL pages being hit hardest.
- *Featured snippet recovery (12 Mar): A complete (or close to it) recovery from the Featured Snippet drop three weeks earlier.
- Product reviews update (8 Apr): Google rewards in-depth product reviews while thin or overly promotional reviews (affiliate links) suffered.
- June 2021 Core Update (2 Jun): Google announces the first core update of 2021 and pre-announces a second update for the next month.
- Spam updates (23 Jun & 28 Jun): Google releases two spam updates less than a week apart.
- Page experience update (25 Jun): After several delays, Google officially rolls out the page experience update.
- MUM (Jun): Google implements its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) technology at an unspecified date in June.
- July 2021 Core Update (1 Jul): The follow-up to the June 2021 Core Update.
- Link spam update (28 Jul): Google rolls out a broad link spam update across languages over a four-week period.
- Page title rewrites (16 Aug): SEOs report a dramatic increase in Google rewriting page titles in the SERPs, later confirmed as an update by Google’s Danny Sullivan.
- *Unconfirmed update (2 Oct): Heavy movement in the SERPs for several days but no word from Google on any algorithm updates.
- Spam update (3 Nov): Google announces its fourth spam update of the year, which rolls out over 7-8 days.
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