The indexing and ranking algorithms are being regularly updated. This is a process that Google follows to show better results on its SERPs. Google Updates have been much talked about and become news when they are announced.
October 25, 2019
BERT Update
Google referred to it as a major change in the history of updates in the last five years. The BERT was made to better understand the search queries. Google said this change impacted both search rankings and featured snippets and BERT (which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) will be used on 10 percent of U.S. English searches.
December 2020 Core Update
Google confirms a Core Update, is rolled out on December 3, 2020. This was the 3rd core algorithm update of the calendar year.
January 22, 2020
Featured Snippet Deduplication
It was confirmed by this update that the web pages in a featured snippet position will no longer be repeated in regular page one free organic listings. Almost all the sites were affected by the update.
February 10, 2021
Passage Ranking
The Passage Ranking was officially launched for English-language queries in the United States. This was an additional ranking factor According to Google: “This change doesn’t mean we’re indexing individual passages independently of pages. Google announced that entire pages will be indexed for ranking. But the passage from pages will be considered as an additional ranking factor.
April 8, 2021
Product Reviews Update
This update was meant to reward “product reviews with in-depth research and not thin content that simply describes a bunch of products.
Broad Core Algorithm Update June 2, 2021
Google announced that a broad core algorithm update was be released very soon. The update was not complete and this was just a future announcement that wasn’t quite ready for this update. Hence it was to be rolled out in two phases. The possibility of the second part was to be rolled out in July, as a Google spokesperson announced.