GOOGLE’S NEW ALGORITHM 2018

Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a major algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways.

For search marketers, knowing the dates of these Google updates can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic for example Amazon and others and ultimately improve search engine optimization. We’ve listed some of the major changes in algorithm that has made the biggest impact on search in India and worldwide.

1. MEDIC CORE UPDATE – 1^st AUGUST, 2018

Google confirmed a “broad core algorithm update,” with wide reports of massive impact. It rolled out over the period of about a week, but peaked on August 1-2. This update seemed to disproportionately affect sites in the health and wellness vertical, although large-scale impact was seen in all verticals.

• This update has mostly affected YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sites.
• Many sites in the diet, nutrition and medical device niches were greatly affected.
• Many large changes with multiple locations across the country appear to have dropped in rankings in favor of smaller, locally based businesses

2. CHROME SECURITY WARNINGS – 24^th JULY, 2018

After warning users of unsecured (non-HTTPS) forms months earlier, Chrome 68 began marking all non-HTTPS sites as “not secure.” The changes rolled out on July 24, but rely on users installing the latest Chrome version, which can take weeks or months.

It is strongly recommended to upgrade your website to HTTPS URLs and be secure, even if your site does not ask for payment information, logins or other private information. Depending upon the size of a site and scope of the project, a migration from HTTP to HTTPS can be quite an undertaking.

3. MOBILE SPEED UPDATE- 9^th JULY, 2018

Six months after announcing it, Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, making page speed a ranking factor for mobile results. Google claimed that this only affected the slowest mobile sites, and there was no evidence of major mobile rankings shifts.

4. VIDEO CAROUSELS, 14^th JUNE, 2018

Google moved videos from organic-like results with thumbnails into a dedicated video carousel, causing a shake-up in results that were previously tracked as organic. At the same time, the number of SERPs with videos increased significantly (+60% in MozCast).

Desktop Video Thumbnails have historically been a relatively stable feature on the Google SERP. Even when there was either a reduction or increase, the new trends tended to last for months upon months with little volatility in between. As of June 14th, Video Thumbnails have all but disappeared from the desktop SERP.

5. SNIPPET LENGTH DROP – 13^th MAY, 2018

After testing longer display snippets of up to 300+ characters for a few months, Google rolled back most snippets to the former limit (about 150-160 characters). Google told Search Engine Land in December that writing meta descriptions doesn’t change with longer search snippets, telling webmasters back then that there is “no need for publishers to suddenly expand their meta description tags. So, time spent increasing meta descriptions for the longer Google search results snippets may have been wasted.

6. MOBILE-FIRST INDEX ROLLOUT – 26^th MARCH, 2018

Google announced that the mobile-first index was finally “rolling out.” Since the index has been in testing for many months, and Google has suggested they are migrating sites gradually, it’s unclear how much impact this specific roll-out had on the overall index. Webmaster should begin to see notifications within Google Search Console.

7. ZERO SEARCH RESULTS – MARCH 14, 2018

Google is now showing zero search results for some types of specific use cases.  Zero results search results pages are search results where there is simply an answer in the answer box / featured snippet style, with zero organic search results on the page.

For example, if you do a search for “time” or time with a time zone, Google may show a results page that has no organic results, but instead an answer box that simply shows the current time.

The following are some of the updates confirmed by Google. Along with these there have been reported speculations of a few more updates by google. This is due to volatility in search results noticed by some webmasters. However, the ones enlisted, are confirmed by Google. We are hoping for more changes and further betterment in Google algorithms in the upcoming days. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.