Google Algorithm Updates: Latest News and Full History

Google changed its results pages in Europe on 8th Sep to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Reuters carried the news, and Google's own verdict on it.

A Google official told Reuters the changes are the largest reduction in quality of service in the engine's 29-year history. That is Reuters' summary of the official's words.

Nick Fox, Google's senior vice-president for knowledge and information, gave Reuters a statement. The changes "degrade the user experience for Europeans", he said, "boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses".

He added: "Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes."

What changes is the page for hotel, flight, restaurant and product searches. Reuters describes one specialised search engine highlighted at the top, then two more with fewer details.

A carousel of hotels, airlines or restaurants sits below them. Reuters says features such as real-time prices are stripped out of it.

Google's view is that the format favours comparison sites such as Expedia or Booking.com. Reuters calls these vertical search services, or VSS.

Google told Reuters that earlier DMA changes cut free, direct booking traffic to European businesses by 30%. It said tests with millions of European users showed dissatisfaction, with people retyping queries.

The context is the Commission's 460 million euro fine of 23rd Jul for Search self-preferencing. Our AI Overviews page covers it, and the Commission gave Google 60 days to comply.

Continued non-compliance can draw periodic penalties of up to 5% of worldwide turnover.

The same day, Search Central documentation gained a page on regional differences in the Search experience. Its changelog dates the addition to 8th Sep.

The page lists each feature by region and query type. The features are aggregator units, supplier units, an ecosystem carousel, job and places site features, and structured data carousels.

Türkiye and South Africa have their own rows.

Google says the page exists "to help publishers, businesses, and aggregators learn about the different regional search features available and understand the eligibility criteria and how to participate".

This is a layout change, not a ranking update. The status dashboard shows nothing, and no ranking system is named.

It is the second Search change in a fortnight that gives EEA searchers a different page from everyone else. The site reputation split of 30th Aug was the first.

A rank tracker measuring from one region sees only its own version of the page. For hotel, travel and product queries, the EEA version now leads with comparison sites.

Google announced on 28th Aug that it is changing how it enforces the site reputation abuse policy. That policy bans publishing third-party content on a trusted site to borrow its ranking power.

The practice is better known as parasite SEO.

From 30th Aug, a manual action under the policy splits by where the searcher is. Outside the EEA it works as before.

The affected portion of the site is demoted in results. The rest of the site is untouched.

Inside the EEA, "the impact of the manual action won't apply". Instead, the affected section "may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site".

Google's documentation changelog dates the updated policy page to the same day. It explains what that separation means: the pages are ranked "on their own merits".

In Google's words, "content is ranked in a consistent way against other content of the same nature (for example, casino content ranks against other casino content)".

The reason is regulatory. Google says the change follows "discussion with the European Commission", and states its objection in the same post: "we remain concerned that an overbroad application of the DMA could prevent us from addressing real threats to the integrity of our search results".

A Google spokesperson went further in a statement to Search Engine Roundtable: "Our European users are no less frustrated by parasite SEO and other deceptive, pay-to-play tactics that degrade search results, and we stand by our Site Reputation Policy."

Search Console mechanics stay in place, with one addition. Sites are still notified of a manual action and can still file a reconsideration request.

Eligible sites can now also "bring disputes to mediation" after that request. No Google manual action has had that route before.

For the first time, a Google spam policy gives the same page different outcomes by the searcher's region. Search Engine Roundtable's coverage makes that point plainly.

Google introduced the policy in March 2024 alongside that month's core and spam updates. Search Engine Roundtable notes that enforcement in Europe began in January 2025.

The practical effect for anyone running or renting space on a large site is simple. A section under a manual action can now rank normally for EEA searchers while staying demoted everywhere else.

The same page can therefore look penalized or clean depending on where you check from. A rank tracker measuring from one region only ever sees half of that.

This page exists because Google names some of its ranking updates. It is useful to know what Google thinks that naming is for.

On 27th Aug, SEO consultant Shahram Rahbari asked John Mueller on Bluesky whether naming an update publicly is "meant to give site owners any actionable signal at the page or site level, or is it purely a timing/transparency notice with no specific action expected from webmasters?"

Mueller answered the same evening: "This is primarily transparency for site owners. If there's something actionable for site owners to do, we'll publish that in our policies, help center, documentation, and blog independently -- usually well in advance of any changes in our systems."

Two things follow for anyone reading a dashboard row. A named update is a timing notice.

It tells you when to look at your analytics, and nothing about what to change.

And the instruction, when there is one, comes through a different channel and lands first. The site reputation policy change for the EEA the day after Mueller's post is the shape.

It arrived as a blog post, a documentation change and advance notice, all separate from any dashboard entry.

That ordering is the practical part. If you wait for a named update to tell you what to do, you are late.

The guidance has already been published somewhere else, usually weeks earlier.

One claim in the coverage is not Google's. Search Engine Roundtable's write-up adds that "Google does not announce all updates, not even smaller core updates".

Mueller's post does not say that. Google's own core-update documentation says the reverse for core updates: "Several times a year, Google makes significant, broad changes to our search algorithms and systems. We refer to these as core updates, and we give notice when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates."

The wider point underneath it is not in dispute. Google has always said it makes many ranking changes it never names.

That is why unexplained ranking swings with no dashboard row stay unpublished on this page.

Hover a result in Google Search and the status bar may now show a google.com/goto address. It is no longer the address of the page you are about to visit.

A server-side redirect now sits between the results page and the destination. Search Engine Roundtable reported on 26th Aug that Google has confirmed the change is rolling out.

A Google spokesperson gave that site a short statement. It does not name what Google is defending against: "We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users."

Search Engine Land, carrying the same confirmation, describes the link shape. The click goes to google.com/goto?url= plus a hashed form of the destination URL.

The redirect then delivers the page.

The measurement side is where this lands for anyone doing SEO. That evidence comes from a provider rather than from Google.

Derek Perkins of the rank-tracking firm Nozzle posted on 26th Aug. Google has been testing "anti-bot measures that eliminate all client side links" in favour of the goto redirects.

The first major test was widely reported in the first week of August. By that morning he was seeing "near 100% rollout across several residential ip providers".

His chart covers roughly four months of the test. Nozzle has been discarding the affected results pages "so that our customer data isn't polluted with opaque links".

The practical problem he describes is one of cost rather than possibility. "The goto links can't be decoded, so providers will have to follow the redirect links", which works at small scale, and "each SERP will have hundreds of links to decode".

He compares it to the num=100 change of autumn 2025. That is the closest precedent for a Google change that broke third-party rank data without touching rankings.

Two things are not established, and both matter before anyone acts on this.

Google's confirmation names abuse and nothing else. The widely repeated reading that this targets AI companies scraping results is other people's inference, not Google's stated reason.

Search Engine Land draws that inference in its own voice. It writes that the change "should make it harder for third-party tools, services, scrapers, and AI engines to scrape the Google search results".

It also points at SerpAPI, a scraping firm it notes Google sued and recently lost a motion against. That is the outlet's technical reading, and Google has not said it.

We have also seen no evidence on whether links inside AI Overviews and AI Mode are affected. The same goes for whether anything changes in the referrer a site receives.

Neither the statement nor the rollout reports address either question.

Search Console is the same kind of open question. Search Engine Land writes that "you have to assume" its data is unaffected, and an assumption is all that is.

Google marked the August 2026 spam update complete on the Search Status Dashboard on 21st Aug 2026. The time was 08:49 UTC, about 4:50 am US Eastern.

Measured from its 16:27 UTC start on 18th Aug, the rollout ran 2 days, 16 hours and 22 minutes. Google's own wording on the incident is simply "The rollout was complete as of August 21, 2026."

That is the longest of the three spam updates Google has shipped in 2026. It beat the June update's 2 days 1 hour by roughly 15 hours.

The March update's 19 hours 30 minutes is still the fastest rollout the dashboard has ever recorded.

It is nowhere near the longest on record. The August 2025 spam update took 26 days 15 hours.

So the 2026 pattern still holds: spam updates now land inside a few days rather than a few weeks.

What "complete" does and does not mean is the part to get right before you read your analytics.

It means the rollout Google announced has finished deploying. Ranking movement caused by this update should have settled.

It does not mean the systems behind it have stopped. Google told Search Engine Roundtable that it will run periodic refreshes of the spam update.

Those refreshes can move rankings again without any new announcement.

Google also repeated its standing position that recovery from a spam demotion can take many months. There is no reconsideration request for an algorithmic demotion.

If you lost rankings between 18th and 21st Aug, the useful next step is narrower than a general content audit. Google ruled out two suspects when it released this one.

It does not target link spam, and it has nothing to do with the site reputation abuse policy.

That points at the rest of the spam policies. Hacked or scraped content, doorway pages, expired-domain abuse and scaled content abuse are the categories that catch otherwise legitimate sites.

Our page on this update carries the full rollout timeline.