Google algorithm updates occur almost every day, but major one; though not often mean significant shifts on the Search Engine Results Page that can stress out every SEO practitioner out there.
Here we list some of those major Google Algorithm updates & how they impacted the SERPs.
Google Panda, Feb 2011
Google Penguin, April 2012
Google Hummingbird, Sep 2013
Google Pigeon, July 2014
Google Mobilegeddon, April 2015
Google Pirate, August 2012
Google Panda Update:
Panda was specifically designed to target sites with poor quality content, content farms & scrapper websites and diminish the presence of low-quality websites in Google’s organic search engine results.
Triggers for Panda:
Google Penguin Update:
Penguin algorithm dealt solely with (black hat SEO) the incoming backlinks for any website. It diminish the SERP presence of websites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.
Triggers for Penguin:
Google Hummingbird Update:
In Google Hummingbird, keyword targeting searches are changed to adapt towards conversational queries with the goal of matching them to more relevant results.
Hummingbird is positive towards the content relevance that tends to provide answers to users queries.
Hallmarks of Hummingbird:
Google Pigeon Update:
Pigeon affects those searches in which the user’s location plays an important part to improve ranking parameters based on distance and location. It’s as an improvement feature and resulted in one of the greatest shakeups of Google’s local and local organic results to date.
Businesses with active Google Places and Google plus profile will experience better results.
Pigeon-proofing your web presence:
Google Mobilegeddon Update:
Google Pirate Update:
The pirated website and copyright violators got hit by Google penalties. Google Pirate works by analyzing the number of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints registered against a website.
Websites that are affected by the Pirate update may be partially or completely excluded from the Google search index.
