Google Algorithm Updates in the past 6 months

Google Algorithm Updates may change several times a year. With these updates, an existing website needs to reflect these changes, otherwise, it could result in the drop in website traffic. Within the past 6 months alone, Google has made several updates to their algorithm. Let’s take a look at some of those updates.

April 2018

In April, Google had made a board core algorithm update. Simply put, this update is all about relevance and to better aid pages with quality content that were previously under-rewarded. The rank risk index starts picking up a 10-day update to Google’s core algorithm. Websites that were previously under-rewarded and have content that is seen of higher quality to its competitors (based on the new algorithm) are seeing an improvement in rankings. However, websites with quality or thin content are now seeing loss in rankings to the board core algorithm update.  Remember, your content always needs to be more relevant to google search!

March 2018

In the beginning of March, Google confirmed their core algorithm updates as they do this several times a year. The updates might cause a drop in your rankings. In this case, Google said that “there’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well,”

In March 26th, after several tests and experiments, Google began rolling out mobile-first indexing. Google uses the mobile version of the page for indexing in order to help mobile users for a better search.

February 2018

There was an unnamed update in February of 2018. According to Moz.com, they stated that

“Rankings showed a spike in volatility (across a number of tools) around February 20th, which quickly settled down, sometimes signaling a targeted algorithm update.” 

It was confirmed that on February 15 Google made changes to image pages, making it difficult for users to view images on the search results. On February 3rd, reports mentioned of some websites experiencing a loss in traffic due to the reduction in the number of featured snippets.

January 2018

New Year, with a New Update announcement! In January 2018, Google announced that starting in July of 2018, they will be completing some major updates for mobile rankings by looking at Page Speeds. Page speed will now become a significant factor for ranking on mobile instead of only just desktop. Google is rolling out a new feature tool that will score your page, basing it off of the load speed of desktop and mobile. In order to be proactive with this update, you want to make sure that you have a fast mobile site applicable with PageSpeed. Just as important as your search engine rankings, this will also improve your mobile user experience within your website.

December 2017

Maccabee Update – Named by Barry Schwartz, there are several minor changes to this update. Many reports show that affiliate sites have the most effects on this change compare to e-commerce sites. The update is a routine effort to improve relevancy, including keyword permutation.

Seroundtable.com explains an example of keyword permutation with the following,

“if they are a travel site, they would target all the destinations they service and also add landing pages for [destination sub name] + [activity name] and sometimes even go beyond that. If they were a service business, they would target [city name] + [service A] and then [city name] + [service B] and so on.”

November 2017

In November 30, 2017 there were Google Algorithm updates to the snippet length. A snippet is a description (meta description) of the page shown below your title page. The snippet length has now increased, which results in a longer description of the page. Meta descriptions can include up to 320 words instead of 160 words. You do not need to update your meta description to meet the maximum words, however, this helps improve your SERP boost. The snapshot report below shows the increase of the snippet length within the month of November, from the rollout of the update.                                                                                          searchengineland.com

There were also some quality updates that have been made on November 15. These changes, however, were shown on several reports to have a minimal affect.

Have you noticed any changes to your site? Maybe these updates might have caused those changes. Comment below the post and let us know!