Google Algorithm Updates: Latest News and Full History

What is a Google core update?

A core update is a broad change to Google's main ranking systems, released "several times a year" and announced on the Search Status Dashboard. Unlike spam updates, core updates do not target specific sites or violations. Google describes them as a reassessment of how its systems weigh content overall, which is why pages can gain or lose visibility without having changed anything themselves.

Rollouts typically take one to three weeks. The extremes so far: the March 2024 core update ran 45 days, while spam updates have become dramatically faster (the March 2026 spam update finished in under 20 hours). Volatility usually comes in waves during the rollout rather than on day one, and Google has confirmed that core updates can deploy "step-by-step, rather than all at one time".

Core vs spam vs the other update types

Core updates are broad quality reassessments; there is nothing specific to "fix" and Google's advice is to keep improving content helpfulness overall. Spam updates improve SpamBrain and related automated detection; sites demoted by one have a concrete policy violation to address, and Google says recovery "can take many months". Helpful content updates existed as standalone releases from August 2022 to September 2023, after which the system merged into core ranking with the March 2024 core update. Reviews updates were announced through November 2023; since then the reviews system changes continuously without announcements. And since February 2026 there is a new species, the Discover core update, scoped to the Discover feed rather than Search results.

Update history before the dashboard era (2011 to 2022)

Before the Search Status Dashboard, updates were announced (or discovered and named by the community) less formally. These are the majors every SEO should know. Community-named updates that Google never officially confirmed are marked.

Recovering from a Google core update

Google's own guidance is deliberately unexciting: a drop after a core update usually does not mean something is "broken" to fix. Its systems reassessed content overall, and other pages are now judged more helpful for those queries. The realistic playbook:

• Confirm the update actually caused it. Compare your traffic dates against the rollout dates in the history table. A drop that started outside a rollout window has a different cause.
• Assess the pages that lost, not the site in the abstract. Google's published self-assessment questions (originality, first-hand expertise, completeness, presentation, people-first intent) are the actual rubric to audit against.
• Expect recovery on core-update timescales. Meaningful recoveries tend to appear at subsequent core updates rather than gradually; partial improvement between updates is possible but modest. For spam updates, Google said in June 2026 that recovery "can take many months".
• Do not chase the update. Removing content wholesale or rewriting everything in a panic routinely makes things worse. Improve or consolidate the weakest content, demonstrate real experience, and wait for the next reassessment.

YMYL, E-E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines

YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life") is Google's label for topics that can significantly affect a person's health, finances, safety or wellbeing. YMYL pages are held to the highest quality bar, which is why health and finance sites feel core updates (Medic in 2018 being the canonical example) more sharply than most.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, the framework Google's human quality raters use to evaluate results. The extra "E" for first-hand experience was added in December 2022. Important nuance: raters and the quality rater guidelines do not directly change any page's rankings. Rater judgments are used to evaluate and train the ranking systems; E-E-A-T is a description of what those systems are tuned to reward, not a score your site carries.