As we all know, Google has been improving its search results since it began back in 1997. Their goal is to make sure that they return the most relevant search results possible, in the fastest way possible. It’s said that Google makes 400 updates a year. That number amounts to a minimum of one update per day.
While some of the updates released were subtle or quite unnoticeable, others hit hard and changed how a whole nation saw their SERPs and how marketers do their SEO campaigns.
What are they? Well, let’s go through all of major algorithm updates to see what patterns form throughout the years.
Google Update February 2003 (Boston)
TARGET
- Incoming links
- Targeted phrases
- Unique content
EFFECT
- Noticeable decrease in backlinks
- Heavily cross-loaded linked sites penalized
- Lower Page Rank of the same sites
Google Update: February 2003 (Cassandra)
TARGET
- Hidden texts
- Hidden links
- Massive internal linking of co-owned sites
EFFECT
- Massive index update
- Lesser spam
Google Update: February 2003 (Dominic)
TARGET
- Back Links
EFFECT
- Cut-down on back linking
- Change in link weighting
- Drop in PageRank
Google Update: June 2003 (Esmeralda)
TARGET
- Page content
- Introduced Everflux
EFFECT
- Lesser spam
- Up to date information
Google Update: November 2003 (Florida)
TARGET
- Keyword stuffing
- Linking
- Low-value SEO techniques
EFFECT
- Road block for Black Hat SEO techniques
- Removal of fishy back links
Google Update: January 2004 (Austin)
TARGET
- Invisible texts
- Meta elements
- Keyword density
EFFECT
- Penalizing of suspicious sites
- Banning of spam sites
Google Update: February 2004 (Brandy)
TARGET
- Anchor text relevance
- Latent Semantic Indexing
EFFECT
- Authority sites picked up rank
Google Update: February 2005 (Allegra)
TARGET
- Suspicious looking links
- Spam sites
EFFECT
- Drop in rankings for sites with low-quality link exchanges
Google Update: May 2005 (Bourbon)
TARGET
- Duplicate content
- Non-canonical URLs
EFFECT
- Removal of 302 Pagejacking
Google Update: October 2005 (Jagger)
TARGET
- Low-quality links
- Link farms
- Paid links
- Reciprocal links
EFFECT
- Cut down on irrelevant reciprocal linking
Google Update: February 2006 (Big Daddy)
TARGET
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Suspected spam sites
EFFECT
- Suspected spam sites placed under supplemental category
- Some highly suspicious sites removed from the index
Google Update: August 2009 (Caffeine)
TARGET
- Indexing
EFFECT
- Fresher search results
- Sites that ranked previously were topped by newer results with more relevant content.
Google Update: February 2011 (Panda)
TARGET
- Content farms
- Scraped content
- Content depth
EFFECT
- Companies layoff workers
- 11% of US websites are affected.
Google Update: April 2012 (Penguin)
TARGET
- Over optimisation
- Link buying
- Keyword stuffing
EFFECT
- 3.1% of search queries
Google Update: Oct. 2012 (Penguin 2.1)
Google Update: Sept. 2013 (Hummingbird)
TARGET
- Improvement in semantic search
EFFECT
- Conversation recognition
- Long tailed queries better understood
- Caters to mobile users
Google Update: Oct. 2014 (Penguin 3.0)
Post-Update Effects
Who was affected?