1. Passage ranking update (February 2021)
With the passage ranking update, Google can now use artificial intelligence to index not only web pages, but individual passages (paragraphs, sentences) from those pages. This means that specific passages can show up as the featured snippet. The aim is to quickly answer very specific queries, instead of making the user comb through the relevant web page to find it.
The takeaway here is not to optimize your posts for passage ranking, but rather to:
Target long-tail keywords.
Provide in-depth, high-quality content on the topic.
Structure your webpage content correctly to make indexing easier for Googlebot.
2. “About this result” update (February 2021)
With the ”About this result” of February 2021, Google provides additional context to individual search results so that users can determine which results would be most helpful to them.
What can you do?
The “About this result” box doesn’t impact your ranking; it’s just a list of facts about the page—some of which are ranking factors. So that includes:
Making sure your site uses https.
Getting quality backlinks.
Appropriately matching the intent of the keyword.
3. 100% mobile-first indexing update (March 2021)
With the rise of mobile traffic in the 2010s, Google began placing more importance on mobile friendliness as a ranking factor in 2015. A year later, mobile-first indexing was introduced — which refers to when Google crawls—and therefore ranks—your website pages according to the mobile version of that content.
To optimize for mobile friendliness:
Make sure you have a responsive site.
Use lazy loading and image compression.
Always manually test popups and form functionalities on your mobile phone
Mobile-friendliness works on a page-by-page basis, but you can find site-wide mobile performance measurements with the mobile usability report in Search Console and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
4. Product reviews update (April 2021)
The goal of Google’s April 2021 product reviews update was to encourage product reviews that don’t just summarize a list of products, but rather provide in-depth research, insightful analysis, and original content. So to create product review content that’s of high quality, Google recommends that you:
Express expert knowledge of the products.
Share unique content beyond what the manufacturer provides.
Provide quantitative measurements for performance.
Compare it to previous models and other products.
Help consumers make a wise purchasing decision.
5. MUM update (May 2021)
Google has been making strides with AI in its algorithms, the most recent being the May 2021 MUM update.
Multitask Unified Model (MUM) is a natural language model that is significantly more powerful than BERT of October 2019 (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers).
MUM is designed for “Helping you when there isn’t a simple answer.” The goal of MUM is to use contextual information from different sources to present comprehensive answers to complex questions.
6. Link spam update (June 2021)
Google’s June 2021 spam update was implemented on web page and image results (so, not local results).
It had two phases, which Google said would each start and finish on the same day—but it actually took two weeks longer than expected. There weren’t many details on this update, but it’s always good to check and make sure your website is protected from spam.
You should be especially careful of these malicious actors if your website provides user interaction via comments, forums, etc. Here are some tips to protect your website from spammers:
Update your website’s SSL certificate
Use Google Search Console to check for security issues and manual action reports.
Do regular clean-ups of suspected spammy actions such as multiple requests from an IP address.
Use noindex to prevent Google from indexing low-trust pages, especially the ones that display user-generated content. Alternatively, you can mark the links as nofollow.
7. Page experience update (June 2021)
In addition to indexing the mobile version of websites, Google has also introduced a specific set of metrics through the page experience update called Core Web Vitals. These are not new metrics, but rather newly prioritized factors to quantify a person’s experience of a webpage.
These include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how fast the main content of a page loads.
First Input Delay (FID): how quickly a webpage responds to the user’s first action on the page.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how stable the layout is (i.e., elements don’t jump around unexpectedly).
8. Page title update (August 2021)
For over a decade, Google has been tweaking page titles in the SERP according to the query. But starting on August 16, people began noticing that Google was drastically changing their page titles, often in a detrimental way. A week later, Google confirmed that it introduced a new system that will no longer adjust titles according to queries, but to better represent the page as a whole.
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