Google is indispensable to our modern lives, be it personal or professional. It influences many of the decisions we make online. This could be locating an address, buying travel tickets, purchasing furniture or electronic appliances, deciding your vacation destination, choosing your kid’s school, and so much more.
The Google search engine offers so much potential to assist with your daily activities. So, with each advancing year, its capabilities keep on improving through updates to its search engine algorithm. Hence, each algorithm update addresses an existing issue, improves upon an existing feature or introduces a new feature.
What is the Google algorithm?
A complex system that retrieves data from its search index and delivers the best possible results for your queries. Numerous ranking factors rank websites according to their relevance in a particular domain or subject. Therefore, the algorithm, along with these ranking factors, lists out the results on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
In the initial years after the launch of the Google search engine, there were limited updates, but in recent years, you could spot thousands every year. You may not even notice many of them unless it’s a core update.
The algorithm updates that impacted SERPs immensely –
- Penguin
- Panda
- Hummingbird
- Pigeon
- Florida
- Big Daddy
- Caffeine
- Jagger
- Vince
- Fred
- Payday
- Freshness Algorithm
- Page Layout Algorithm
- Venice Update
- EMD (Exact Match Domain)
- Mobilegeddon
- Quality Updates
- RankBrain
History of recent algorithm updates
- February 2023: Product reviews update.
- March 2023: Core algorithm update.
- April 2023: Update targeting review content on a page-level basis.
- August 2023: Core algorithm update.
- September 2023: Helpful content updates.
- October 2023: Spam update.
- October 2023: Core algorithm update.
- November 2023: Core algorithm update.
- November 2023: Update targeting review content on a page-level basis.
- March 2024: Core algorithm update addressing low-quality content.
The latest algorithm update
According to Google, the latest March 2024 core algorithm update is in the rollout phase and more extensive than any other core updates. It aims to tackle issues with low-quality and spam content.
- Improved quality rankings: It aims to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by 40 %. Hence, it will help ascertain if webpages offer good quality content and give a good user experience.
- Lesser spam: This update ensures that you won’t get to see low-quality content on SERP but rather get access to high-quality and trustworthy content.
- Tackling content abuse: It will look into the mass production of content for the purpose of enhancing search engine rankings. Also, it won’t matter whether it’s done by humans, automation or a combination of both.
- Misuse of site reputation: There’ll be a crackdown on websites that host low-quality or third-party content in order to get traffic by misusing its reputation.
- Misuse of expired domains: The new policy targets the purchase and repurposing of expired trusted domains in order to promote low-quality content on SERP.
Therefore, Google is on a mission to crackdown on low-quality content through its new core algorithm update. So, this will be a big relief for those seeking genuine and high-quality content online. Additionally, read more about the core update on Google Search Cenrtal Blog.
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