What we know about Google's 2021 Mid-Year SEO update

Google’s June and July 2021 core algorithm update has started rolling out, but we expect it will be finalised at the mid-month.

According to Google, "the June 2021 Core Update rollout is complete as of June 12, 2021.". On July 1, Google began rolling out the July 2021 core update, one month after the June 2021 core update.

Later today, we are releasing a broad core update, as we do several times per year. It is called the June 2021 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates is here: https://t.co/e5ZQUA3RC6

This will be followed by the July 2021 Core update. Here’s more information about that…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 2, 2021

What do we know about the latest Google core update in June and July 2021? There are more than one update in this wave. Publishers and website owners should not focus on one or two specific signals but look after all the aspects of building a better web.

Google's Multitask Unified Model (MUM)

Google started to use Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to optimise query results. Generally speaking, Google is better to understand user intends by using Multitask Unified Model (MUM). When a user is searching "football", Google will also display "soccer" content if the content is relevant.

For example, when searching "football transfer news", Google also use the keyword "football gossip", "transfer gossip" to find relevant content.

Google's June 2021 core update

It is a classic “broad core update” that Google releases every several months.

It is a general core update to refresh all the changes made on the website during the past period before the last core update.

Google's July 2021 core update

It is a general core update to reverse some issues and bugs during the June 2021 core update.

Google's Spam Algorithm update June 2021

Google rolled out two waves of Spam Algorithm update during June 2021, on 23rd and 28th.

On June 23rd, Google announced “The second part of our spam update has begun today, and it will also conclude later today unless we share otherwise,” Google said.

The update is tackling Spam/scraped content, auto-generated and scraped content, hacked/cloaked/spam domains. Typical spam content:

Autogenerated content
Link schemes
Unoriginal content
Cloaking
Hidden text or links
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Abusing structured data

Google's Page Experience update

Google's Page Experience Update was announced in November 2020 and began gradually rolling out in mid-June 2021. It will be completed by the end of August.

Google said on Twitter “the page experience update is now slowly rolling out (Top Stories will begin using this new signal by Thursday). It will be complete by the end of August 2021.”

Starting Thursday, June 17, Google will start using the page experience signals for eligibility into the top stories carousel and section. Google will not prefer AMP pages for top stories carousel only.

Google will be considering the three Core Web Vitals metrics as the signals for searching ranking, such as LCP, FID, and CLS.

You can find the overall metrics of the current page experience at your Google Search Console. Google listed all the issues and how to improve the overall page experience metrics.

More Resources

https://blog.google/products/search/how-we-update-search-improve-results/
https://blog.google/products/search/how-mum-improved-google-searches-vaccine-information/