SEO Review Of The Google Algorithm Updates Of 2020
SEO Review Of The Google Algorithm Updates Of 2020
There was some early suspicion within the search community that major algorithm updates would be on hold during the pandemic — in retrospect, we can’t imagine that was the case. News Editor Barry Schwartz has already recapped 2020’s most important algorithm updates, so here’s a brief summary of what rolled out.
The core updates. Google got started early, launching the January 2020 core update less than two weeks into the year. It typically takes about two weeks for these things to complete rolling out, but the company said it was mostly finished four days later, on January 16th.
Four months later, the May 2020 core update shook things up again, with some calling it an “absolute monster.”
The dust was allowed to settle for most of the year (in terms of core updates, at least), until the December 2020 core update launched, right between the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping season and the end-of-the-year holidays. Based on some reports, this was the most impactful core update of the year.
BERT goes from 10% to almost 100%. During its SearchOn event, Google announced that BERT is now powering nearly all English-language queries.
In December, keen-eyed search professionals recognized that the much-publicized departure of AI researcher and diversity advocate Timnit Gebru from Google was inextricably linked to the potential risks associated with training language models using large data sets. Those potential risks include using datasets from the internet, which may contain bias against marginalized peoples, which could then conceivably manifest in the language models used in search engines.
Announced, but not live. Announced in May, the Page Experience update is not expected to roll out until May 2021. It includes a mix of existing search ranking factors, such as the mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, the intrusive interstitials penalty, and safe browsing penalty, along with new metrics for speed and usability, known as the Core Web Vitals.
We already know that the Page Experience update will only be applied to mobile rankings, at least initially. There may also be a visual indicator to distinguish mobile search listings that offer a good page experience. And, when this update goes live, Google will also lift the AMP requirement for its Top Stories section, opening it up to articles that meet its threshold for page experience factors.
Passage indexing was announced in October and slated to begin this year, but Google has confirmed to us that it is not yet live. To be clear, Google doesn’t actually index passages separately; it’s more “passage ranking” than “passage indexing.”
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