This was the first broad core algorithm update of 2022 and the first in more than 6 months. Google said it would take up to two weeks to fully roll out. As with all other past core updates, Google has made broad changes to how its ranking systems assess content.

Google said the third release of the product reviews update, which will take a “few weeks” to fully roll out, builds on the work of the two prior product review updates. Like those, this update is meant to help Google to identify high-quality product reviews and reward them with better rankings.

There were three new bits of advice from Google around ranked lists, recommendations of “best” products and creating reviews for multiple vs. individual products.

Google announced that the Page Experience Update previously released on mobile SERPs would be rolled out to desktop. This rollout officially occurred from February 22nd to March 3rd. MozCast peaked at 99.4°F on March 3rd and 98.8°F on February 23rd.

MozCast measured historically high ranking flux of 105.4°F on February 5th, with a possible aftershock of 102.5°F on February 7th. Some other flux trackers picked up similar spikes, but no update was officially confirmed.

During a period of relatively high volatility, MozCast recorded a temperature spike of 102.1°F on January 10th. No Google update was confirmed, but industry chatter picked up ranking changes on January 11th.

MozCast measured very high volatility, peaking at 105.0°F, just two days after recording a temperature of 101.3°F. While Google did not confirm these specific dates, both events occurred during the December 1-21 rollout of the Product Reviews Update.

While not a traditional algorithm update, Google released a major overhaul to the design of Top Stories, splitting it into two columns on desktop and (in many cases) dramatically increasing the amount of SERP real estate occupied by news results.

On December 1, Google announced another update to reward high-quality product reviews (and a refresh of the April 2021 update). This update reportedly rolled out over three weeks, and MozCast recorded multiple days of high SERP volatility in December.

On November 17, Google announced the rollout of a core update. While this update officially wrapped up at the end of November, most tracking sites showed a strong single-day spike (with MozCast hitting 101.7°F on November 17). The overlap with Black Friday sparked controversy in the SEO community.

Google announced another broad spam update, which rolled out over about 8 days. MozCast peaked at 96.9°F on November 2nd. Unlike the July update, Google did not specifically call this a "link spam" update and did not provide much detail about the sites and tactics targeted.

MozCast measured two days of high flux on October 1-2, peaking at 100.9°F on October 2nd. Multiple tools and SEOs observed major ranking changes, but Google did not confirm this update and no explanation has been reported.

Starting around August 16, SEOs began to notice a substantial increase in Google rewriting page titles in SERPs. Google later confirmed this change (but not the exact date), and, after many complaints about result quality issues, scaled back some of the changes in September.

Google announced a link spam update that reportedly rolled out over 2-4 weeks. According to Google, this was a broad algorithm update across multiple languages. MozCast showed heavy flux on July 28, spiking at 100.3°F.

A follow-up to the June Core Update, the July 2021 Core Update rolled out from July 1-12. Peak volatility on MozCast hit 102.7°F on July 1st, but we saw temperatures in the 90s on July 5th, 8th, and 11th. Like most Core Updates, Google was light on specifics.

After multiple delays, Google started rolling out the Page Experience Update on June 25th, announcing that the rollout would continue through August 2021. This update included Core Web Vitals and impacted both organic results and News results (including Top Stories).

Google released two spam updates, on June 23rd and June 28th. It was unclear how the two updates were connected or what specifically was impacted. While specific sites showed significant impacts, there was no clear impact on overall rankings volatility.

In an unprecedented move, Google simultaneously announced the (apparently connected) June and July 2021 Core Updates. The June Core Update reportedly rolled out from June 2-12, peaking in MozCast at a temperature of 107.3°F on June 3rd.

Google announced an update to reward in-depth reviews over thin reviews and spammy affiliates (impacting English-language only at launch). While the update seemed focused on review quality, the exact factors involved appear to be complex.

Three weeks after roughly 40% of Featured Snippets mysteriously disappeared from SERPs, they just-as-mysteriously returned to their previous levels. Google did not provide confirmation nor an explanation.

MozCast registered a 40% day-over-day drop in SERPs with Featured Snippets, their lowest point since 2015. On further inspection, these were heavily focused on short queries (especially 1-word queries) and disproportionately hit YMYL queries (health and finance).

Google rolled out so-called "passage indexing" (which is probably closer to passage ranking) for US/English queries. While we measured two days of moderate rankings flux, it was unclear exactly how the update impacted SERPs. Google initially estimated this update would impact 7% of queries.

Google announced a Core Update that appeared to roll out quickly, with the bulk of the impact hitting on December 3rd. MozCast hit 112°F, on par with the March 2020 Core Update and August 2018 "Medic" Update. Some sites reported reversals a few days later, but this seems to have been limited.

Google claimed that the bulk of the indexing and canonicalization bug(s) had been fixed by around October 14th. MozCast measured a drop in indexed pages and a temperature of 104°F around October 12th, with temperatures in the 90s lasting for a few days after.

Google confirmed an indexing and canonicalization bug starting in early September. MozCast measured temperatures of 99°F on September 29th and 30th, and detected dips in indexed pages on September 23rd and 29th.

SEOs reported massive ranking changes for a few hours on August 10, which then seemed to disappear. Google later confirmed a glitch in their indexing systems. MozCast registered 97°F the following day (August 11), but it's unclear if this event was related.

Google announced another Core Update (the second of 2020), which caused heavy rankings flux from about May 4-6. Peaking at 113°, it measured on MozCast as the second-highest Core Update after the August 2018 "Medic" update.

Google announced that URLs in Featured Snippets would no longer be appearing as traditional organic results, in line with Google's philosophy that a Featured Snippet is a promoted organic result. This had significant implications for rank-tracking and organic CTR.

Google rolled another core update, with MozCast showing heavy flux across three days and a high temperature of 97°F, in line with the previous three core updates (but smaller than the August 2018 "Medic" core update).

Google confirmed that the BERT natural language processing algorithm was rolling out internationally, in 70 languages. This announcement came after speculation from the SEO community, and the exact timing of the roll-out is unclear.

Google upgraded their algorithm and underlying hardware to support the BERT natural language processing (NLP) model. BERT helps Google better interpret natural language searches and understand context.

Google rolled out another core update. The update measured at 97°F on MozCast (fairly high, but not historically high) and seemed to impact sites affected by previous core updates. Google did not provide many details.

Google pre-announced a "site diversity" update, claiming it would improve situations where sites had more than two organic listings. Moz data showed that, while the update did marginally improve SERPs with 3-5 duplicate sites on page one, the impact was relatively small.

Google pre-announced a "core" update, but with limited details. Sites impacted in previous core updates seem to have been affected, in some cases, and some major UK publishers reported heavy losses. On average, the impact was smaller than the August "Medic" update, as measured by MozCast.

Two days in a row, Google confirmed indexing bugs. The first bug reportedly was preventing new content from being properly indexed. MozCast confirmed unusually high SERP flux from May 23-25 (peaking on the 23rd), but it's unclear if this was directly related to the bugs.

Google confirmed a bug that dropped pages from the search index around the weekend of April 5th. Moz data suggested drops on April 5th and 7th, with about 4% of stable URLs falling off of page one. Most sites recovered soon after.

Google confirmed a "core" update, stating it was the third major core update since they began using that label. MozCast hit a peak of 101.2°F, a bit below March 1st temperatures. No specific details were given about the nature of the update.

Google confirmed a "broad core algorithm update," with wide reports of massive impact. It rolled out over the period of about a week, but peaked on August 1-2. This update seemed to disproportionately affect sites in the health and wellness vertical, although large-scale impact was seen in all verticals.

After warning users of unsecured (non-HTTPS) forms months earlier, Chrome 68 began marking all non-HTTPS sites as "not secure." The changes rolled out on July 24, but rely on users installing the latest Chrome version, which can take weeks or months.

Six months after announcing it, Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, making page speed a ranking factor for mobile results. Google claimed that this only affected the slowest mobile sites, and there was no evidence of major mobile rankings shifts.

Google moved videos from organic-like results with thumbnails into a dedicated video carousel, causing a shake-up in results that were previously tracked as organic. At the same time, the number of SERPs with videos increased significantly (+60% in MozCast).

After testing longer display snippets of up to 300+ characters for a few months, Google rolled back most snippets to the former limit (about 150-160 characters).

MozCast picked up heavy algorithm flux that peaked on April 17 and continued for over a week. Google later confirmed a "core" update, but didn't provide any specifics and the update wasn't named by Google or the SEO community.

Google announced that the mobile-first index was finally "rolling out." Since the index has been in testing for many months, and Google has suggested they are migrating sites gradually, it's unclear how much impact this specific roll-out had on the overall index. Webmaster should begin to see notifications within Google Search Console.

On a small set of Knowledge Cards, including some time/date queries and unit conversion calculators, Google started displaying zero organic results and a "Show all results" button. A week later, Google stopped this test, but we believe it is an important sign of things to come.

Google confirmed a "core" update on March 7th, but volatility spiked as early as March 4th, with a second spike on March 8th, and continued for almost two weeks. This may have been multiple updates or one prolonged, rolling update. The "Brackets" name was coined by Glenn Gabe; no details were provided by Google.

After testing longer search snippets for over two years, Google increased them across a large number of results. This led us to adopt a new Meta Description limit -- up to 300 characters from the previous 155 (almost doubling). Google confirmed an update to how snippets are handled, but didn't provide details.

With the launch of Chrome 62, Google started warning visitors to sites with unsecured forms. While not an algorithm update, this was an important step in Google's push toward HTTPS and may have a material impact on site traffic.

Google officially launched their jobs portal, including a stand-alone 3-pack of job listings in search results. These results drew data from almost all of the major providers, including LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder.

Algorithm changes beginning on February 1st continued for a full week, peaking around February 6th (some reported the 7th). Webmaster chatter and industry case studies suggest these were separate events.

Google started rolling out a penalty to punish aggressive interstitials and pop-ups that might damage the mobile user experience. Google also provided a rare warning of this update five months in advance. MozCast showed high temperatures from January 10-11, but many SEOs reported minimal impact on sites that should have been affected.

The first phase of Penguin 4.0, which probably launched around September 22-23, was the rollout of the new, "gentler" Penguin algorithm, which devalues bad links instead of penalizing sites. The exact timeline is unconfirmed, but we believe this rollout took at least a few days to fully update, and may have corresponded to an algorithm temperature spike (113°) on September 27th.

After almost two years of waiting, Google finally announced a major Penguin update. They suggested the new Penguin is now real-time and baked into the "core" algorithm. Initial impact assessments were small, but it was later revealed that the Penguin 4.0 rollout was unusually long and multi-phase (see September 27th and October 6th).

Just more than a year after the original "mobile friendly" update, Google rolled out another ranking signal boost to benefit mobile-friendly sites on mobile search. Since the majority of sites we track are already mobile-friendly, it's likely the impact of the latest update was small.

Google made major changes to AdWords, removing right-column ads entirely and rolling out 4-ad top blocks on many commercial searches. While this was a paid search update, it had significant implications for CTR for both paid and organic results, especially on competitive keywords.

Google made a major announcement, revealing that machine learning had been a part of the algorithm for months, contributing to the 3rd most influential ranking factor. *Note: This is an announcement date - we believe the actual launch was closer to spring 2015.

Google announced a Panda update (most likely a data refresh), saying that it could take months to fully roll out. The immediate impact was unclear, and there were no clear signs of a major algorithm update.

After many reports of large-scale ranking changes, originally dubbed "Phantom 2", Google acknowledged a core algorithm change impacting "quality signals". This update seems to have had a broad impact, but Google didn't reveal any specifics about the nature of the signals involved.

In a rare move, Google pre-announced an algorithm update, telling us that mobile rankings would differ for mobile-friendly sites starting on April 21st. The impact of this update was, in the short-term, much smaller than expected, and our data showed that algorithm flux peaked on April 22nd.

Google's major local algorithm update, dubbed "Pigeon", expanded to the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The original update hit the United States in July 2014. The update was confirmed on the 22nd but may have rolled out as early as the 19th.

A Google representative said that Penguin had shifted to continuous updates, moving away from infrequent, major updates. While the exact timeline was unclear, this claim seemed to fit ongoing flux after Penguin 3.0 (including unconfirmed claims of a Penguin 3.1).

More than two years after the original DMCA/"Pirate" update, Google launched another update to combat software and digital media piracy. This update was highly targeted, causing dramatic drops in ranking to a relatively small group of sites.

More than a year after the previous Penguin update (2.1), Google launched a Penguin refresh. This update appeared to be smaller than expected (<1% of US/English queries affected) and was probably data-only (not a new Penguin algorithm). The timing of the update was unclear, especially internationally, and Google claimed it was spread out over "weeks".

Google made what looked like a display change to News-box results, but later announced that they had expanded news links to a much larger set of potential sites. The presence of news results in SERPs also spiked, and major news sites reported substantial traffic changes.

Google announced a significant Panda update, which included an algorithmic component. They estimated the impact at 3-5% of queries affected. Given the "slow rollout," the exact timing was unclear.

Following up on the June 28th drop of authorship photos, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship markup (and would no longer process it). By the next morning, authorship bylines had disappeared from all SERPs.

After months of speculation, Google announced that they would be giving preference to secure sites, and that adding encryption would provide a "lightweight" rankings boost. They stressed that this boost would start out small, but implied it might increase if the changed proved to be positive.

Google shook the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered some local results and modified how they handle and interpret location cues. Google claimed that Pigeon created closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm(s).

John Mueller made a surprise announcement (on June 25th) that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs (after heavily promoting authorship as a connection to Google+). The drop was complete around June 28th.

Less than a month after the Payday Loan 2.0 anti-spam update, Google launched another major iteration. Official statements suggested that 2.0 targeted specific sites, while 3.0 targeted spammy queries.

Google confirmed a major Panda update that likely included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. Officially, about 7.5% of English-language queries were affected. While Matt Cutts said it began rolling out on 5/20, our data strongly suggests it started earlier.

Just prior to Panda 4.0, Google updated it's "payday loan" algorithm, which targets especially spammy queries. The exact date of the roll-out was unclear (Google said "this past weekend" on 5/20), and the back-to-back updates made the details difficult to sort out.

Google "refreshed" their page layout algorithm, also known as "top heavy". Originally launched in January 2012, the page layout algorithm penalizes sites with too many ads above the fold.

After a 4-1/2 month gap, Google launched another Penguin update. Given the 2.1 designation, this was probably a data update (primarily) and not a major change to the Penguin algorithm. The overall impact seemed to be moderate, although some webmasters reported being hit hard.

Announced on September 26th, Google suggested that the "Hummingbird" update rolled out about a month earlier. Our best guess ties it to a MozCast spike on August 20th and many reports of flux from August 20-22. Hummingbird has been compared to Caffeine, and seems to be a core algorithm update that may power changes to semantic search and the Knowledge Graph for months to come.

Google added a new type of news result called "in-depth articles", dedicated to more evergreen, long-form content. At launch, it included links to three articles, and appeared across about 3% of the searches that MozCast tracks.

Google confirmed a Panda update, but it was unclear whether this was one of the 10-day rolling updates or something new. The implication was that this was algorithmic and may have "softened" some previous Panda penalties.

Google's Matt Cutts tweeted a reply suggesting a "multi-week" algorithm update between roughly June 12th and "the week after July 4th". The nature of the update was unclear, but there was massive rankings volatility during that time period, peaking on June 27th (according to MozCast data). It appears that Google may have been testing some changes that were later rolled back.

Google announced a targeted algorithm update to take on niches with notoriously spammy results, specifically mentioning payday loans and porn. The update was announced on June 11th, but Matt Cutts suggested it would roll out over a 1-2 month period..

After months of speculation bordering on hype, the 4th Penguin update (dubbed "2.0" by Google) arrived with only moderate impact. The exact nature of the changes were unclear, but some evidence suggested that Penguin 2.0 was more finely targeted to the page level.

Right before the Christmas holiday, Google rolled out another Panda update. They officially called it a "refresh", impacting 1.3% of English queries. This was a slightly higher impact than Pandas #21 and #22.

Google outlined a second set of 10 updates, announcing that these posts would come every month. Updates included related query refinements, parked domain detection, blog search freshness, and image search freshness. The exact dates of each update were not provided.

After an expose in the New York Times about how e-commerce site DecorMyEyes was ranking based on negative reviews, Google made a rare move and reactively adjusted the algorithm to target sites using similar tactics.

This time, real-time search was for real- Twitter feeds, Google News, newly indexed content, and a number of other sources were integrated into a real-time feed on some SERPs. Sources continued to expand over time, including social media.

In a major change to their logo-and-a-box home-page Google introduced Suggest, displaying suggested searches in a dropdown below the search box as visitors typed their queries. Suggest would later go on to power Google Instant.

While not your typical algorithm update, Google integrated traditional search results with News, Video, Images, Local, and other verticals, dramatically changing their format. The old 10-listing SERP was officially dead. Long live the old 10-listing SERP.

Throughout 2006, Google seemed to make changes to the supplemental index and how filtered pages were treated. They claimed in late 2006 that supplemental was not a penalty (even if it sometimes felt that way).

Technically, Big Daddy was an infrastructure update (like the more recent "Caffeine"), and it rolled out over a few months, wrapping up in March of 2006. Big Daddy changed the way Google handled URL canonicalization, redirects (301/302) and other technical issues.

Although obviously not an algorithm update, a major event in Google's history - Google sold 19M shares, raised $1.67B in capital, and set their market value at over $20B. By January 2005, Google share prices more than doubled.

This was the update that put updates (and probably the SEO industry) on the map. Many sites lost ranking, and business owners were furious. Florida sounded the death knell for low-value late 90s SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, and made the game a whole lot more interesting.

Before "Boston" (the first named update), there was a major shuffle in the Fall of 2002. The details are unclear, but this appeared to be more than the monthly Google Dance and PageRank update. As one webmaster said of Google: "they move the toilet mid stream".

Guaranteeing SEO arguments for years to come, Google launched their browser toolbar, and with it, Toolbar PageRank (TBPR). As soon as webmasters started watching TBPR, the Google Dance began.

• Google Launches The Google Toolbar (Google)