·
Panda
is to fight against Low quality content
and Penguin is to fight against Web Spam.
2012 UpdatesJanuary 30-Pack -
January 5, 2012
Updates including image search landing-page quality
detection, more relevant site-links, more rich snippets, and related-query
improvements.
2011 Updates
Overstock.com Penalty
- January 2011
In a rare turn of events, a public outing of shady SEO
practices by Overstock.com resulted in a very public Google penalty. JCPenney
was hit with a penalty in February for similar bad behavior. Both situations
represented a shift in Google's attitude and foreshadowed the Panda update.
Attribution Update
- January 28, 2011
In response to high-profile spam cases, Google rolled out an
update to help better sort out content attribution and stop scrapers. According
to Matt Cutts, this affected about 2% of queries. It was a clear precursor to
the Panda updates.
Panda/Farmer Update
- February 23, 2011
Google Panda was a major algorithm update hit sites hard which
seemed to crack down on thin content, content farms, sites with high
ad-to-content and a number of other quality issues.
+1 Button - March 30, 2011
Responding to competition by major social sites, including
Facebook and Twitter, Google launched the +1 button directly next to results
links. Clicking [+1] allowed users to influence search results within their
social circle, across both organic and paid results.
Google Panda 2.0
- April 11, 2011
Google rolled out the Panda update to all English queries
worldwide.
Google Panda 2.1
- May 9, 2011
Google appeared to roll out yet another round of minor changes.
Schema.org - June
2, 2011
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced support for a structured
data by creating new schemas for richer search results.
Google Panda 2.2
- June 21, 2011
Google Panda 2.2 continued to update Panda-impacted sites
and data.
Google+ - June
28, 2011
Google+ was launched for a number of social media failures
like Facebook with Google+ around circles for sharing content and was integrated
into Gmail and within 2 weeks Google+ reached 10M users.
Google Panda 2.3
- July 23, 2011
It was a simply an update to the Panda data and ranking
factors.
Panda Goes Global 2.4
- August 12, 2011
Google launched Panda internationally, both for
English-language queries globally and non-English queries except for Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean.
Expanded Sitelinks
- August 16, 2011
After experimenting for a while, Google officially rolled
out expanded site-links, most often for brand queries.
Pagination Elements
- September 15, 2011
Google introduced the rel="next" and rel="prev"
link attributes to fix crawl and duplication problems created by pagination.
Google also announced that they had improved automatic consolidation and
canonicalization for "View All" pages.
516 Algo Updates
- September 21, 2011
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Congress that Google made 516
updates in 2010. They tested over 13,000 updates.
Panda 2.5 -
September 28, 2011
Google rolled out another Panda update & effected some
sites, reported large-scale losses.
Panda
"Flux" - October 5, 2011
Other minor Panda updates occurred on 10/3, 10/13, and
11/18.
Query Encryption
- October 18, 2011
Google announced they would be encrypting search queries,
for privacy reasons. In Google Analytics, this disrupted organic keyword
referral data, returning "(not provided)" for some organic traffic.
Freshness Update
- November 3, 2011
This update primarily affected time-sensitive results, but signaled
a much stronger focus on recent content.
Panda 3.1 -
November 18, 2011
After Panda 2.5, Google entered a period of "Panda
Flux" where updates started to happen more frequently and were relatively
minor. Some industry analysts called the 11/18 update 3.1, even though there
was no official 3.0.
December 10-Pack
- December 1, 2011
Updates included related query refinements, parked domain
detection, blog search freshness, and image search freshness.
2010 Updates
Google Places – April 2010
·
Google maps rebranded Google Places, integrated
places pages more closely with local search results.
May Day – May 2010
·
Algorithm change impacting the long tail traffic
especially large scale thin content
Caffeine (Roll out) –
June 2010
·
Google speed crawling & indexation with a
50% fresher index.
Brand Update – August
2010
·
Same Domain appears multiple times on a SERP
Google Instant –
September 2010
·
Google instant introduced for displaying search
results as a Query.
Instant Preview –
November 2010
·
A magnifying glass icon appeared on Google
search result for quick preview of landing page directly from Search Result
pages.
2009 Updates
Vince – February 2009
·
Major update that seemed to favor Big Brands
Rel – Canonical Tag
– February 2009
·
Google / Yahoo / Microsoft announced support for
the canonical tag
Caffeine – August
2009
·
Massive infrastructure change for speed crawling
and indexation
Real Time Search –
December 2009
·
Real time search was for Real – Twitter feeds /
Google News / Newly indexed Content including social media.
2008 Updates
Demey – April 2008
·
Ranking changed drastically. Large differences
in ranking between these data centers.
Google Suggest – August
2008
·
Introduced suggested searches in a drop down
2007 Updates
Universal Search – May 2007
·
Google integrated News / Video / Images / Local
and other verticals
Buffy – June 2007
·
Buffy was just an accumulation of smaller
changes
2006 Updates
Supplemental Update – November 2006
·
Changes to supplemental index
2005 Updates
Nofollow – January 2005
·
Google, Yahoo & Microsoft introduced to
Control outbound link quality
Allegra – February
2005
·
Beginning to penalize suspicious links
Bourbon – February
2005
·
Duplicate content & Non-Canonical like www
vs. non-www urls
Xml Sitemap –
June 2005
·
Google allowed XML Sitemaps via Webmasters
Tools.
Personalized Search
– June 2005
·
Search History to Automatically Adjust Result
Gilligan – September
2005
·
Toolbar PR Updates only once every 3 months
Jagger – October 2005
·
Targeted at low-quality links like Reciprocal
links, Link Farms & Paid Links
Big Daddy – December
2005
·
Infrastructure update, URL Canonicalization & Redirects (301 / 302)
2004 Updates
Austin – January 2004
·
Hilltop Algorithm – Detecting deceptive on-page
tactics, invisible text and META-TAG Stuffing
Brandy – February
2004
·
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
·
Anchor Text Relevance
·
Understand Synonyms and took keyword analysis
next level
2003 Updates
Florida Update – November 2003
·
90’s Negative SEO Tactics / Keyword Stuffing
Supplemental Index
– September 2003
Fritz update –
July 2003
·
Index was Changing Daily
Esmerelda – June 2003
·
Google Dance Replaced Everflux
Dominic – May 2033
Cassandra – April
2003
·
Link Quality Issue, Hidden text & Hidden Lines
Boston – Feb 2003
·
The first Named Google Update
2002 Updates
Boston - September 2002
·
Monthly Google Dance
2000 Updates
Google Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) Launched
