Reviews update

1. June 8, 2010Google 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
2. February 24, 2011Google 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
3. November 3, 2011Google 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
4. January 19, 2012Google 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
5. April 24, 2012Google 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
6. August 2013Hummingbird, which Google describes as a major improvement to its overall ranking systems.Source: developers.google.com
7. 2015Panda becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
8. 2015Google launches RankBrain, the first deep learning system used in Search. It relates the words in a query to real-world concepts.Source: blog.google
9. April 21, 2015Google 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
10. September 23, 2016Penguin 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
11. 2018Google introduces neural matching. The system helps relate queries to pages through underlying concepts.Source: blog.google
12. 2018Launch 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
13. October 25, 2019Google applies BERT to ranking and featured snippets. At launch it affects about one in ten English searches in the US.Source: blog.google
14. October 15, 2020Google 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
15. April 8, 2021First product reviews update. It rewards in-depth product reviews and initially covers English-language reviews only.Source: developers.google.com
16. May 18, 2021Google introduces MUM, a model trained across 75 languages. Google calls it 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.Source: blog.google
17. July 26, 2021First link spam update. It aims to identify and nullify link spam across multiple languages and rolls out over two weeks.Source: developers.google.com
18. August 25 to September 9, 2022With the helpful content update, Google aims to show more original, helpful content written for people.Source: status.search.google.com
19. December 5, 2022 to January 12, 2023December 2022 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier and works globally in all languages.Source: status.search.google.com
20. April 12 to April 25, 2023The product reviews update becomes the reviews update. Google says it now covers reviews of products, services and other things.Source: status.search.google.com
21. September 14 to September 28, 2023September 2023 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier again.Source: status.search.google.com
22. November 8 to December 7, 2023November 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
23. March 2024The helpful content system becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
24. March 5, 2024Three 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
25. May 5, 2024The site reputation abuse policy takes effect. Google had given site owners time to prepare since March.Source: developers.google.com
26. August 5, 2024In 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
27. November 19, 2024Google 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: October 8, 2026.