Major Google Search Algorithm Updates in 2019

It’s hard to understand the way Google works without hearing about the term Algorithm. Google Algorithms are always subject to much attention not just in the tech world, but these days, even among common people. People are increasingly paying attention to the updates and the way they influence the digital marketing and web activities of businesses and brands.

Google’s algorithms are a complex system employed to recover data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a particular query. Google uses algorithms and ranking signals to deliver web pages that are ranked by relevance, on its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In the early days of operation, Google only used to make a handful of Algorithm updates every year. With the digital world expanding every minute in these times, Google makes thousands of Algorithm changes every year.

What’s it in 2019?

2019 saw Google making many changes in its Algorithms. Among these, the tech giant constituted a naming convention for core updates and employed natural language understanding to search results and queries. Let’s take a look at the major Google Search Algorithm Updates of 2019.

Core updates

This happens a few times every year and causes conspicuous ranking volatility. From the previous year, Google began confirming, notifying and even naming these core updates.

March 2019:

The March 2019 core update was the first important algorithm change of the year. It followed Google’s new naming convention referring to the type of update and the date in which it happened. Google conducted a survey about this update among 500 community members and the results did not reveal any obvious patterns regarding the types of sites and content affected. Many people responded that there was a negative impact after the update, a few believed there was a positive impact and a small number of people said that they did not experience any change.

June 2019:

This was the first pre-announced Google Core update and it happened in June 2019. The update rolled out in 5 days and during that period the Unrelated Diversity Update also came in to being.

September 2019:

The September Core Update was announced on September 24 and rolled out in a few hours. Opinions from various SEO toolset providers say that this wasn’t as impactful as the June Core Update, but had a larger effect on the ranking of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) sites.

BERT

The BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Algorithm is a major update from Google, that will impact 10% of the search queries. This update will affect complicated search queries that depend on the context. BERT is a natural language processing, pre-training approach that can be applied to a large body of the text. It deals with tasks such as entity recognition, part of speech tagging, question-answering and other natural language processes. BERT is designed to help Google understand natural language text from the Web. It makes a machine understand the meaning of certain words in a sentence, but with all the nuances of the context.

The update rolled out on October 25. BERT is the biggest change to Google’s algorithm since the RankBrain that happened in 2015.

A few confirmed updates

Different Signals for YMYL queries

Google published a white paper detailing how it deals with disinformation in Search, News, YouTube and other products. It made clear that Google gives more prominence to signals that indicate Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EAT) in its ranking algorithms for queries in which results can affect a user’s well being. These are also known as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) queries.

Diversity Update

The aim of this update is to increase domain diversity in search results by restricting domains from having more than two listings within the top results for a query. The update also counts subdomain URLs as part of the root domain.

Apart from these, an update came out in August that was designed to ensure featured snippets feature current information.

One of the best Digital Marketing company in San Francisco, SocialPulsar pays close attention to every Google update, be it big or small. This way we are able to serve our clients with the best results. To know more or avail our cutting-edge expertise, drop in a mail or call us soon.