The Medic update is the name the SEO industry uses for a Google core update from August 2018. According to reports, Google called it a broad core algorithm update. According to reports, the label arose because many health and medical sites saw changes in visibility. This entry covers the search update, not medicine or games. It is marked historical.
At a glance
- Started
- August 2018 (according to reports)
- Completed
- Not documented by Google
- Type
- Core update, name from the SEO industry
- Affects
- According to reports mainly health and YMYL sites
- Confirmed by
- According to reports by Google employees on X, no dated Google page
Last checked:
What happened in August 2018?
In early August 2018 rankings shifted noticeably. According to reports, Google confirmed a broad core update without naming specific changes. Wikipedia reports that Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land named it “Medic”, and that pages on health and other topics with high impact on readers (YMYL, Your Money or Your Life) were affected most, though sites from other industries were hit as well. These are observations by SEOs. Google has not said that it targeted health sites. The name did not come from Google.
What applies today?
Google now describes core updates as significant, broad changes to its search algorithms and systems, released several times a year and announced on the Search Status Dashboard. Most sites do not need to worry about them and may not even notice one.
Google’s advice after a large drop is an honest assessment of the whole site, asking whether content is helpful, reliable and people first. Small drops, such as moving from position 2 to 4, need no action. Effects of improvements can take from a few days to several months, and Google gives no guarantee of recovery. A technical fix for “the update” does not exist.
Interest in YMYL topics and in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines grew around that time. The guidelines describe how human raters evaluate search results. Raters do not set rankings directly.
- Google announces the completion of Caffeine, its new web indexing system. Google says it delivers 50 percent fresher results than the previous index.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google announces a ranking change against low-quality and copied content that noticeably affects 11.8% of queries. Google later refers to the system by its nickname “Panda”.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google improves how it decides when to favour recent results. According to Google the change affects roughly 35 percent of searches and builds on Caffeine.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google launches a change that looks at page layout. Pages with little content and many ads above the fold may rank lower.Source: developers.google.com
- Google announces a change against webspam, later nicknamed “Penguin”. It affects about 3.1% of English queries and roughly 3% of German queries.Source: developers.google.com
- Hummingbird, which Google describes as a major improvement to its overall ranking systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Panda becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Google launches RankBrain, the first deep learning system used in Search. It relates the words in a query to real-world concepts.Source: blog.google
- Google starts rolling out the mobile-friendly update, boosting mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. The industry unofficially calls it “Mobilegeddon”.Source: developers.google.com
- Penguin becomes part of the core algorithm and now works in real time. Before that, the list of affected sites was only refreshed periodically.Source: developers.google.com
- Google introduces neural matching. The system helps relate queries to pages through underlying concepts.Source: blog.google
- Launch of SpamBrain, Google’s AI-based spam prevention system. Google says it identified nearly six times more spam sites in 2021 than in 2020.Source: developers.google.com
- Google applies BERT to ranking and featured snippets. At launch it affects about one in ten English searches in the US.Source: blog.google
- Google presents passage ranking, which can assess individual passages of a page for a query. Google expects it to improve 7 percent of queries.Source: blog.google
- First product reviews update. It rewards in-depth product reviews and initially covers English-language reviews only.Source: developers.google.com
- Google introduces MUM, a model trained across 75 languages. Google calls it 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.Source: blog.google
- First link spam update. It aims to identify and nullify link spam across multiple languages and rolls out over two weeks.Source: developers.google.com
- With the helpful content update, Google aims to show more original, helpful content written for people.Source: status.search.google.com
- December 2022 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier and works globally in all languages.Source: status.search.google.com
- The product reviews update becomes the reviews update. Google says it now covers reviews of products, services and other things.Source: status.search.google.com
- September 2023 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier again.Source: status.search.google.com
- November 2023 reviews update. As the reviews system is now improved at a regular pace, Google no longer posts future updates on the Status Dashboard.Source: status.search.google.com
- The helpful content system becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Three new spam policies against expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. The March 2024 spam update launches the same day.Source: developers.google.com
- The site reputation abuse policy takes effect. Google had given site owners time to prepare since March.Source: developers.google.com
- In the US antitrust case against Google, the court describes Navboost as a signal that memorises which documents users click for a query. This is a court document, not a Google publication.Source: storage.courtlistener.com
- Google tightens the site reputation abuse policy. First-party involvement does not change the assessment when third-party content exploits the host site’s ranking signals.Source: developers.google.com
A selection, not a complete list. Core and spam updates since November 2021 have their own timeline. Names such as Florida (2003), Pigeon (2014), Possum (2016), Fred (2017) and Medic (2018), as well as Payday Loan and EMD, come from the SEO industry. Their dates rest only on trade press reports and posts by Google employees on X; Google has not published a dated page about them. Last checked: .
Example
A medication guide site loses many positions in August 2018. The owner finds no technical error. Pages that credit authors and name their sources rank ahead. Observations like this fed the industry discussion about expertise and trust (assessment).
Sources
- Core updates – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- What site owners should know about Google's August 2019 core update – Google Search Central Blogdevelopers.google.com
- Google Search – Wikipedia (secondary)en.wikipedia.org
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