Major Algorithm Updations Of Google
If you are new into blogging or fortunately became a website owner, it's necessary to be up-to-date with certain algorithm updations of Google. For search marketers with years of experience, knowing dates of these updations can help in explaining the sudden changes in their site's ranking and organic website traffic.
Every minute, 2 million searches are made on Google and to keep such a giant search process running, Google algorithms constantly changed to ensure optimized websites. Every year, google changes its search algorithm around 500-600 times. While most of these are minor, Google occasionally brings out major updations, that affects search results in significant ways.
In this post, I have covered all major Google algorithmic updates from past 15 years that have had biggest impact on search.
December - 2000 Update
Google launches their browser toolbar! This free browser plug-in helps internet users to search for information with Googles quick, highly relevant search from any webpage on the internet. This might not seem to you so exciting now, but back then it was definitely a huge milestone to a user friendly search engine. Along with it came ToolBar PageRank(TBPR) and that's when webmasters began to know their page rank and the Google Dance began. But now Google has officially confirmed that they wont be showing Page rank anymore but will be using internally for its ranking process.
September 2002- 1st Documented Update
There was a major shuffle in the Fall of 2002 that left many webmasters into an utter shock. They wondered "how on earth can google drop sites that were ranked in the top ten and are now on page 20. They move a toilet midstream without hinting they are going to". This was one of the webmasters' view. The details are unclear of what Google did, but it was definitely something more than the monthly Google Dance and Page Rank update.
2003 Updates
Boston was the first named Google update announced at SES Boston. Google originally aimed at a major update, so the first few updations were a combination of algorithmic changes and major index refreshes(Google Dance). It laid more emphasis on quality backlinks.
Florida update on November 2003 was the update that put updates on the map. Business owners were furious as they lost their site's ranking. Florida update was like a death knell to those low-value SEO tactics like, keyword stuffing.
2004 Updates
There were 3 updations in 2004, two of the remarkable one's being Austin and Brandy. Austin came in to clean up what Florida did. Some of the sites that weren't hit too hard by Florida update, got hit real hard on January 23 2004 by Austin updation. Google continued to crack down invisible texts and meta-tag stuffing.
The Brandy updation on 17th-20th Feb 2004 resulted in major changes in the results of search engine. One of the founder of google Sergey Brin said that google had made 5 significant changes to its algorithmic formulas during that time. Increase in Index size, Latent Semantic Indexing(LSI), Links and Anchor texts, Neighborhoods & Downgrading of Traditional Tag-based Optimization. Google optimization then became a lot more harder than it used to be.
2005 Updates
Nofollow updation during Jan 2005 was to combat spam and control outbound link quality. That was when Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collectively introduced the "nofollow" attribute. Nofollow helps to clean up spammy blog comments.
Among the many updations that took place in 2005, another remarkable one is Big Daddy updation on December 2005. Big Daddy changed the way Google handled URL canonicalization, redirects (301/302) and other technical issues.
2006 Updates
Throughout 2006 Google made changes to supplemental index and how filtered pages were treated. In late 2006 they claimed that supplemental was not a penalty even if it sometimes felt that way. In December there were false alarm about an update, but google reported no major changes.
2007 Updates
Universal Search update on May 2007 saw the integration of traditional search results of google with News, Videos, Images, Local and other verticals dramatically changing their format.
Buffy update on June 2007 may be considered as a continuation of the June 2007 Update, but it has now been given a name. The Buffy update was introduced in honor of Vanessa Fox who was leaving leaving Google. Also updated to single word search result and other small changes.
2008 Updates
Dewey update on April 2008 saw a large scale shuffle at the end of March and into early April, but the specifics were unclear. Some suspected that Google was pushing its own internal properties including Google Books but that evidence of that was limited.
Google Suggest update on August 2008 made a major change to their logo. Google introduced Suggest to display suggested searches in a drop down below the search box as visitors typed their queries. Suggest would later go on to power Google Instant.
2009 Updates
Venice update on February 2009 was a "minor change" claimed by Matt Cutts, but others felt it had long term implications.
Real-time Search update on Decemer 2009 was for real Twitter feeds, Google News, newly indexed content and a number of other sources were integrated into a real-time feed on some some SERP's. Sources continued to expand over time including social media.
2010 Updates
Google Places update on April 2010 was the official launch of Google Places even-though "Places" pages were rolled out in September 2009 which was originally only a part of Google Maps.
May Day update on May 2010 showed webmasters a significant drop in their long-tail traffic. Matt Cutts later confirmed that May Day was an algorithmic change having impact on long-tail. Sites with thin content seemed to be hit hard, foreshadowing the Panda update.
Caffeine update on June 2010 saw the launch of Caffeine infrastructure after months of testing. Caffeine not only boosted Google's raw speed, but integrated crawling and indexing much more tightly resulting a 50% fresher index.
Google Instant update on September 2010 saw the launch of Google Instant that displayed search results while a query was being typed.
Social Signals update on December 2010 was a relatively new development in google although many SEO's had long suspected it would happen. Google and Bing confirmed that they use social signals to determine ranking, including data from Twitter and Facebook.
2011 Updates
Panda/Farmer update on 23rd February 2011 was against the growing complaint that low quality content sites were ranked higher than higher quality sites that seemed more important to users. Panda/Farmer was a major algorithm update that affected almost 12% of all search results, which include dramatic losses for some companies and immense gain for some high quality sites. Panda was intended to crack down sites that has thin content, content farms, content with very less quality and spelling mistakes. Different versions of Panda was released in the same year,
Panda 2.0 update on 11th April 2011 was rolled out to all English queries worldwide(not limited to English speaking countries).
Panda 2.1 update on 9th May 2011 was rolled out with yet another round of changes. These changes were not discussed in detail by Google and seemed to be a minor one.
Panda 2.2 update on 21st June 2011 continued to update Panda impacted sites and data and was officially acknowledged.
Google+ update on 28th June 2011 launched a serious attack on Facebook. Google+ revolved around sharing contents around your circles and was tightly integrated into products like Gmail. Within 2 weeks Google+ reached 10M users.
Panda 2.3 update on 23rd July 2011 rolled out yet another update was unclear whether new factors were introduced or this was simply an update to Panda data and ranking factors.
Panda 2.4 update on 12th August 2011 was rolled out internationally both for English language queries globally and non-Englisg queries except for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Google reported that this impacted upto 6-9% of queries in affected countries.
Panda 2.5 update on 28th September 2011 rolled out another Panda update. Specific details of what changed was unclear but some sites reported large-scale losses.
Freshness update on 3rd November 2011 announced that an algorithmic change providing freshness would impact up to 35% of queries( almost 3x times to that of Panda 1.0). This update affected time-sensitive results, but signaled a much stronger focus on recent content.
2012 Updates
January 30-Pack update on 5th January 2012 is when Google announce 30 changes over their previous month including image search landing page quality detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets and related-query improvement.
Venice update on 27th February 2012 was a part of their monthly update and Google code-named it "Venice". This update was to aggressively localize organic results and more tightly integrated to local search data. The exact roll out date was unclear.
Penguin update on 24th April 2012 was yet another huge step taken by google to reward high-quality sites and reduce webspam practices. Some of the webspam activities they described were keyword stuffing, link farming and link exchange, comment spamming and guest blogging beyond a certain limit. This update impacted an estimate of 3.1% of English queries.
Knowledge Graph update on 16th May 2012 was a major step towards semantic search. Google rolled out "Knowledge Graph", an SERP integrated display about certain places and things and facts.
Exact Match Domain (EMD) update on 27th Sep 2012 is when google announced a change in the way it was handling exact match domains. This led to large-scale devaluation, reducing the presence of EMD's in the MozCast data set by over 10%. Official word is that this change impacted 0.6% of queries by volume.
Penguin #3 update on 5th October 2012 released a minor Penguin data update impacting 0.3% of queries, although it was suggested that next penguin update would be major.
2013 Updates
Panda #25 update on 14th March 2013 was pre-announced by Matt Cutts that it would be the last panda update and this was integrated into core algorithm.
Phantom update on 9th May 2013 signaled significant traffic loss but the exact nature of this update was unknown.
Payday Loan update on 11th June 2013 announced a targeted algorithm update to take on niches with spammy results. Although this update was announced on June 11th, Matt Cutts suggested it would roll out over a 1-2 month period.
Hummingbird update on 20th August 2013 seemed to be a core algorithm update that may power semantic search and Knowledge graph for months to come. Hummingbird was on of the google's major updation.
Authorship Shake-Up update on 19th December 2013 saw the disappearance of authorship mark-up from roughly 15% of queries over a period of about one month. The fall bottomed out around 19th but the numbers remain volatile.
Payday Loan update on 16th May 2014 was just prior to Panda 4.0 updation. It targeted spammy queries. Exact date of roll out was unclear and the back to back updates made the details difficult to sort out.
Panda 4.0 update on 19th May 2014 had confirmed a major Panda update that included both an algorithm update as well as data refresh. Officially about 7.5% of English queries were affected.
Payday Loan update on 12th June 2012 was released less than a month after the Payday Loan 2.0 and it was a major iteration. Official statements suggest that 2.0 targeted specific sites while 3.0 targeted spammy queries.
Pigeon update on 24th July 2014 shook the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered some local results and modified how they handle and interpret location cues. Those company sites who hadn't updated their location was preferred less while ranking.
Pigeon Expands(UK,CA,AU) update on 22nd December 2014 saw the major local algorithmic update dubbed "Pigeon", expanded to Unite Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
Mobilegeddon update on 22nd April 2015 was a rare move that google pre-announced an algorithm update, telling us that rankings would differ for mobile friendly sites starting on 21st April. The impact of this update was short term much smaller than expected.
The Quality update on 3rd May 2015 acknowledged a core algorithmic chance impacting "quality signals". This update have had a broad impact but Google didn't reveal any specific nature of the signals involved.
RankBrain - on 26th October 2015 revealed that machine learning had been a part of the algorithm from months contributing to the 3rd most influential ranking factor. Note that this announcement date but we believe that actual launch was closer to spring 2015.
2016 Updates
Mobile-Friendly 2 update on May 12 2016 was released just more than a year after the original mobile-friendly update Mobilegeddon. Google rolled out another ranking signal booster to benefit mobile friendly sites on mobile search. Since the majority of sites they tracked are already mobile-friendly, its likely that the impact of the latest update was small.
Note - There is no single rhyme or reason to how Google Updates are named as claimed by Google.
Like I said earlier these are just the important updations that I have mentioned. And if you want to know more about Google from its beginning, check out my first post on History of Google.
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