A Visual History of Google Algorithm Changes

A VISUAL HISTORY OF GOOGLE ALGORITHM CHANGES Over the years, Google has made thousands of changes to the way it finds and prioritizes information on the web. While most of these changes have been small, there have also been several major changes, which have significantly impacted how marketers think about SEO. Below is a snapshot of when (and why) Google rolled out its most notable algorithm changes. Note: We've also included some important, non-algorithm changes that have had a big impact on search. YEAR JANJARY "03 DECEMBER '04 "05 90. "07 "08 "09 "10 "12 13 ISADAV AVA JUNE 2003 2004 FEBRUARY JUNE/JULY NOVEMBER JANUARY ESMERELDA APRIL MAY FEBRUARY BOSTON CASSANDRA DOMINIC FLORIDA AUSTIN BRANDY & FRITZ Crackdown on Index expansion, rollout of Latent Crackdown on linking Improvements to the counting & reporting of backlinks. Crackdown on More emphasis on quality backlinks. Improvements to the index from co-owned keyword-stuffing "invisible" text, Semantic Indexing (LSI). domains, hidden & other black hat meta tag-stuffing. text & links. infrastructure. SEO tactics. 2005 2006 FEBRUARY JUNE PERSONALIZED OCTOBER JAGGER MAY DECEMBER NOVEMBER OCTOBER GOOGLE LOCAL ALLEGRA BOURBON BIG DADDY SUPPLEMENTAL SEARCH UPDATE Improvements to how duplicate content & Results take user's Map data is reciprocal links, link integrated with Local canonicalization, Business Center (LBC) data. Crackdown on Crackdown on Updates to URL suspicious-looking Changes to the links. non-canonical URLS search history into farms, paid links redirects, & other supplemental index & filtered pages. are treated. account. technical issues. 2007 2008 2009 MAY JUNE APRIL FEBRUARY DECEMBER THE BIG ONES UNIVERSAL. BUFFY DEWEY VINCE REAL-TIME SEARCH PANDA & PENGUIN SEARCH Update to single- Unspecified update Big brands get a Twitter feeds, Google Rolled out in 2011, the Panda Integration of traditional results with News, Video, Images, Local, etc. update affected II.8% of queries and was specifically targeted at article directories (a.k.a. "content farms"). As a result, sites including wisegeek.com, suitel0l.com, and ezinearticles.com saw huge drops in their search results rankings. word search results to the search index. boost in search News, & new content & other small results. are integrated into real-time feed. changes. 2010 2011 APRIL MAY JUNE FEBRUARY NOVEMBER CAFFEINE PANDA FRESHNESS The Penguin update (2012) affected an estimated 3.1% of English searches. Gaming sites and porn sites were among the biggest search ranking losers. GOOGLE PLACES MAY DAY UPDATE LBC rebranded "Places," is integrated low-quality pages more closely with Launch of new web indexing system, ranking for long-tail resulting in 50% fresher index. Crackdown on thin content, content farms, sites with high on recent content in Crackdown on Greater emphasis put local search results. keyword searches. ad-to-content ratio. search results. 2012 2013 JANUARY FEBRUARY APRIL MAY SEPTEMBER AUGUST AUGUST PENGUIN KNOWLEDGE GRAPH SEARCH • VENICE EXACT MATCH IN-DEPTH HUMMINGBIRD YOUR WORLD DOMAIN ARTICLES Crackdown on link schemes, keyword- stuffing, other black images included hat tactics. Google recognizes full-question searches, emphasizes More localized Google+ data & user results appear for profiles included in Relevant facts & Crackdown on New type of result, broad queries. low-quality sites that dedicated to more alongside traditional have search terms in evergreen, long-form high-quality content. search results. results. their domain names. content. SOURCE: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change HubSpot MOZ LEARN MORE: http://bit.ly/seo-myths-14 FEBRUARY