Google makes thousands of algorithms updates each year. Google Search algorithms are updated thousands of times to ensure the most relevant, reliable results are listed most prominently.

This ongoing commitment to searcher experience and the quality of results has helped Google decrease the number of irrelevant results appearing on a search results page by over 40% over the past five years, the search engine says.

In this article, we’ll look back at the updates that shaped SEO over this past year and how they may impact your plans going forward.

The Page Experience Update

Google began rolling out its long-awaited Page Experience update in June 2021 and announced its completion on September 2.

SEO professionals and marketers of all stripes had anxiously awaited this one since it was first revealed back in November 2020. Page Experience is pretty self-explanatory; it was designed to improve the experience searchers have on each website.

Google’s Link Spam Update

Google warned marketers in July that its Link Spam Update would have measurable results for those affected:

“In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam fighting change today — which we call the “link spam update…

Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms.”

The update announcement was buried in a Google Search Central Blog post under the subheading ‘Improving our systems to fight link spam.

Summer Broad Core Updates

Google began rolling out a core update in June, ran out of time to implement everything it was meant to do, and picked up where it had left off in July.

SEO pros speculated that this update brought about an increase in People Also Ask results, may have targeted Image Search results in some way, and could even have inadvertently increased spam in search results.

How Do You Make a Successful SEO Strategy this 2022?

You don’t have to stay on top of every single Google update. But being aware of new features, shifting SERPs opportunities, and major Google updates gives essential context to what you’re seeing in your site’s performance data.