Overview
Most current ranking guidance answers a specific past update. This page lists the updates that changed how SEO is practiced and skips minor ones. What to do after a drop is on core-updates.
Named updates through the helpful content system
Use this table to match a traffic pattern to the system behind it. Status comes from Google’s ranking systems guide where it says so.
| Update | Date | What it targeted | Status today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Panda | Feb 2011 | Thin, duplicate, and content-farm pages; first site-wide quality signal | Part of core ranking since 2015 |
| Penguin | Apr 2012 | Manipulative links: paid links, link networks, exact-match anchor spam | Real-time and part of core since 2016; see backlinks |
| Hummingbird | Aug 2013 | Query parsing rewrite toward intent over literal keywords | Retired as a named system; foundation for later language systems |
| Mobile-friendly update | Apr 2015 | Mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches | Mobile-first indexing declared complete Oct 2023; Mobile-Friendly Test retired Dec 2023. See mobile-first |
| RankBrain | 2015 | Relating words to concepts for unfamiliar queries | Active |
| Possum | Sep 2016 | Local pack filtering by proximity and shared-address duplicates | Unofficial name; local ranking in local-seo |
| Fred | Mar 2017 | Low-value pages built around ads or affiliate links | Unofficial name; Google confirmed an update, not the name |
| Core updates begin | Mar 2018 | Broad reassessment of relevance and quality across the index | Several times a year; see core-updates |
| BERT | Oct 2019 | Transformer language understanding for queries and documents | Active |
| MUM | May 2021 | Multimodal, multilingual model; Google documents narrow production uses | Active in narrow uses; AI Overviews and AI Mode run on Gemini models |
| Page experience update | Jun 2021 (mobile), Feb 22 to Mar 3, 2022 (desktop) | Page experience signals including Core Web Vitals | One input among many; see core-web-vitals |
| Helpful content update | Aug 25, 2022 | Site-wide classifier for search-engine-first content, however produced | Part of core ranking since Mar 2024 |
| Spam policies: scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, site reputation abuse | Announced Mar 5, 2024; site reputation abuse enforced from May 5, 2024 | Mass-produced pages, repurposed expired domains, third-party content on borrowed authority | Enforced through spam updates and manual actions; see ai-content-policies |
Match a traffic drop to a rollout window before acting
Compare the first day of a drop with the rollout dates below before changing anything. A drop that starts inside a core update window points to a relevance or quality reassessment, which no single fix reverses; improve the affected pages; any recovery shows gradually or with a later core update, and Google does not guarantee one (core-updates). A drop inside a spam update window points to an algorithmic policy match, so read the named policy and remove the pattern it describes (ai-content-policies); manual actions run separately and appear in Search Console’s Manual actions report. A drop outside every window usually has a technical cause: a robots or noindex change, a redirect, or a rendering failure (technical).
Announced core, spam, and Discover rollouts since 2024
Use this table for exact dates; it is copied from the Google Search Status Dashboard and omits unannounced updates. Check the dashboard for anything newer.
| Update | Rollout |
|---|---|
| March 2024 core update | Mar 5 to Apr 19, 2024 |
| March 2024 spam update | Mar 5 to Mar 20, 2024 |
| June 2024 spam update | Jun 20 to Jun 27, 2024 |
| August 2024 core update | Aug 15 to Sep 3, 2024 |
| November 2024 core update | Nov 11 to Dec 4, 2024 |
| December 2024 core update | Dec 12 to Dec 18, 2024 |
| December 2024 spam update | Dec 19 to Dec 26, 2024 |
| March 2025 core update | Mar 13 to Mar 27, 2025 |
| June 2025 core update | Jun 30 to Jul 17, 2025 |
| August 2025 spam update | Aug 26 to Sep 22, 2025 |
| December 2025 core update | Dec 11 to Dec 29, 2025 |
| February 2026 Discover update | Feb 5 to Feb 27, 2026 (Discover only) |
| March 2026 spam update | Mar 24 to Mar 25, 2026 |
| March 2026 core update | Mar 27 to Apr 8, 2026 |
| May 2026 core update | May 21 to Jun 2, 2026 |
| June 2026 spam update | Jun 24 to Jun 26, 2026 |
| August 2026 spam update | Aug 18 to Aug 20, 2026 |
| September 2026 spam update | Started Sep 24, 2026; Google said it could take up to two weeks |