Almost every single day, Google changes its program algorithm. Each year, 500- 600 times Google Change its algorithm, while most of these algorithm changes are minor changes, Google occasionally releases Major algorithmic updates (like Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affect search results in significant ways. Here is the List of Major Google Algorithm update which brought significant change in the google search history.
How it works: Better Understanding of Search Language
How BERT Update Works: BERT Stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”. BERT update helps to better understand the nuances and context of words in searches and better match those queries with more relevant results in SERP’s. That means Google rollout this algorithm to understand the search language better and to give more accurate results of what the user is searching for. This is an updating of the RankBrain Algorithm update which google launched a few years ago. Currently, they launched this update for English, and soon they were planning to bring for all the other languages.
Release date: March 2017
Hazards: Thin Content & website with heavy Affiliate Content
How it works: Google brought Fred to update to targets the websites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. As per Google, the website needs to have its content majorly. The majority of affected sites with Fred Update are blogs with low-quality posts that appear to be created mostly for the purpose of generating ad revenue and the website with thin content and too many ads.
Release date: September 2016
Hazards: Tense competition in the target location (Local Search Results)
How it works: Google brought Possum update to ensure that local results with more accuracy depending on the visitor search location. The closer we are to a business address, the more likely we can see it among local results. Possum update also resulted in greater variety among results ranking for very similar queries in SERP’s.
Release date: October 2015
Hazards: Poor UX (User Experience) on the website, websites with shallow content, Lack of Query specific results
How it works: Google RankBrain update is part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. This update is all about the machine learning system that helps Google to understand the meaning behind the user search queries and to serve exact matching search results in response to those queries. Google RankBrain update plays a key role in SERP rankings and this is one of the most important factors for the website to rank on Google.
Release date: April 2015
Hazards: Websites with poor mobile usability and websites not optimized for smaller screens.
How it works: Google brought Mobilegeddon update to ensure the websites are optimizing for smaller screens especially mobile devices and that mobile-friendly pages which are fully optimized for mobile screens, ranks at the top of mobile search, while pages which are not optimized for mobile devices are going to filter out from the SERP’s or Google is going to downrank the website.
Release date: July 2014
Hazards: Websites with poor On-page & Off-page Optimization
How it works: Google’s Pigeon update affects the search queries in which the searcher location plays a key role. This also updates basically creates closer ties between the local algorithm and the core algorithm. The UI & UX of the website need to build in a better way and the backlinks which we were creating for our website need to be from trusted resources and the traditional Search Engine Optimization Factors are now used to rank local results.
Release date: August 2013
Hazards: Too much Keyword stuffing in the website page and low-quality content in the website
How it works: Googles Hummingbird update helps search engines to better understand the search queries and provide search results that actually match searcher intent. While keywords continue to be important, this update makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if the search doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered. This is possible with the help of natural language processing that mainly relies on latent semantic indexing (LSI) and co-occurring terms and synonyms.
Release date: April 2012
Hazards: Website Spammy or irrelevant links & links with over-optimized anchor text
How it works: Google Penguin’s update major objective is to down-rank the websites with more irrelevant and spammy links and also the website with over-optimized anchor texts without any relevant meaning. Google Penguin update is also a core algorithm update in which it works in real-time.
Release date: February 2011
Hazards: Websites with Duplicate content, plagiarized and thin content, too much keyword stuffing in webpages
How it works: Google Panda update is the core update that Google rolled out to check the website which has copied the content from the internet, too many keywords stuffed for easy ranking in SERPs and user-generated spam. Panda basically gives a Quality score to web pages and this score is then used as a major ranking factor. Initially, Panda was majorly a filter rather than part of Google’s ranking algorithm, but in 2016, it was officially incorporated into the core algorithm. Panda rollouts have become more frequent, so both penalties and recoveries now happen faster for the website which violates the panda terms.
About The Author:
Nagarjuna Reddy. Sudha is a Digital Marketing Manager at Web I7 Digital Media and Digital Marketing Trainer at Learn Digital Academy, the best digital marketing training institute in Bangalore. Nagarjuna is a well experienced digital marketer, trained more than 250 digital marketers up to date. He is passionate about creating digital strategies that lead to better content engagements and sales driven traffic.
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