Google has been launching new algorithm updates since its’ early days. It’s always working on improving user experience and the results the algorithms show.
Some search updates are huge and affect websites of all sizes and industries.
Google calls those “Core Updates.”
Other updates have a smaller impact in general. But once they add up, they can have a significant effect on your website and your company’s future.
In this detailed report, we’ll share with you the biggest updates we’ve seen on Google in 2019. You’ll get a better understanding of where Google is heading in the future.
By the end of this, you’ll also learn how to align your business objectives with Google’s vision so you can achieve better rankings.
Let’s get started.
Newsgate Algorithm Update
This was the first algorithm update in 2019, which came out in the first two weeks of January.
Google didn’t announce the roll-out of this update. Yet, tracking tools picked up some drastic changes in rankings and traffic.
The new algorithm mainly affected news websites and popular blogs. It came to give original content creators a fair chance of getting traffic to their sites.
Sites that publish slightly tweaked content without any new information were negatively affected and lost lots of traffic. Websites that shared unconfirmed news also saw a massive decrease in their rankings and visitors.
March 2019 Core Update
On March 12, Google rolled out of the first core update for 2019. It was first announced via Google SearchLiason’s Twitter account — and was later confirmed by Danny Sullivan.
This week, we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see these tweets for more about that: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 13, 2019
There was a lot of talk about what has changed after this update and how it affected search results.
Some said that it affected backlinks and spammy blog networks, others believe that it was directed towards the health sector.
However, to this day, nothing was confirmed by Google.
June 2019 Core Update
Google pre-announced on June 2nd, 2019, that a new core update was coming out in the next few days.
According to industry experts, this is one of the biggest updates Google rolled out in 2019. But, the search engine giant didn’t provide any further details about the changes it made.
There was no clear pattern for what industries were most affected by this.
Tomorrow, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2019 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this tweet for more about that: https://t.co/tmfQkhdjPL
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 2, 2019
It took about five days for the whole update to roll out where 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录s began to see changes in their rankings and analytics.
Diversity Update
A few days later, Google rolled out a new algorithm update that was unrelated to the previous one.
The new algorithm came to offer some diversity in the search results. It minimized the number of results that come from the same website on a single page.
Websites now can only get up to two spots in the SERPs for the same query.
This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 6, 2019
This update isn’t generalized across all websites where more than two results need to be displayed. For example, Amazon can still get multiple spots if the search term is related to items available on Amazon.
The diversity update also affects subdomains and treats them as part of the root domain. That means that a website with many subdomains can only get two spots on the first page for the same query.
The solution for this update is simple:
Create fresh content for different search terms. But remember, it has to be helpful to the user first.
Featured Snippets Update
On August 1st, Google announced on its blog a change to how featured snippets are now more focused on providing updated answers.