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THE GOOGLE ZOO: UPDATES IN THE ALGORITHM

mordansean July 4, 2018

Google does not stop and, since its inception, has always tried to be updated so that the results of its search engine offer the best solutions to the searches of its users. Before, it could be said that anarchy reigned in the SEO world, and by means of a set of techniques considered “dirty”, you could see how your page reached the top positions of the ranking in this search engine with hardly any effort.

Today, Google pursues that the most useful pages for users are those that occupy the best positions, and this has left a long run of penalized pages because of the updates of its algorithm. Do you want to know what have been the most important updates in the last decade? Well, keep reading!

 

BEFORE STARTING, WHAT IS AN ALGORITHM?

The algorithms of Google are computer formulas that, through some processes, try to show users the results that can be closer to what they are really looking for.

To try to guess what the user wants to find, the algorithms are based on more than 200 different factors, such as the keywords, the relevance of the website, if it is updated normally, proximity, etc. All this has improved the user experience by providing the information you are looking for in a single click.

Next, we will see what the different updates were during the last decade and what affected them fundamentally.

UNIVERSAL SEARCH

We can not count it as an algorithm update as such, but in May 2007, Google radically changed the format of the search results and also integrated in the SERP the option of News, Images, Videos, Maps, etc., also known as search vertical. At that time, Google went from being a simple web search engine, to being a universal search engine that encompasses all kinds of digital content; and this is the case today, 10 years later.

CAFFEINE

This update was in progress from August 2009 to June 2010, at which time the update was officially established. It was an update that affected the whole system, whose main objective was to work on the infrastructure of the system to improve the speed of crawling and indexing the pages. One of the giant brands of logo design industries Soda & Soft Drinks Logo providers were bad affected. The company was generating more than 10 million turnover comes down to 1 million within the 2 months after this update.

PANDA

Already in May 2010, users began to notice how their traffic in long-tail keywords declined, especially those pages that offered little content. It was not until a year later, on February 23, 2011, when the update that caused the downloads was known: Panda. This update focuses on the quality of content, penalizing those websites that plagiarize or duplicate their content.

Remember: the more entertaining to read is what you write and more useful information, the more you like the users, so your traffic will grow along with your search engine positioning.

 

PENGUIN

How simple it was when, buying a considered amount of links that pointed to your website, you could see your website perfectly positioned among the first results of the search engine! But of course, Google always seeks that its users find what they are really looking for, and this kind of “traps” made their results not always the most optimal.

So in April 2012, Google updated its algorithm with Penguin, in order to penalize websites whose link quality was rather low. Thus, websites that obtained a large number of links under payment, directories or link farms that were of little value, saw their positions fall overnight.

If you do not want to be penalized, try to get links naturally in pages related to the topics you treat on your page; and above all, try to ensure that these links are of quality. It is always better to have little but good, that much and bad.

HUMMINGBIRD

It is estimated that Hummingbird was released around the end of August 2013, and beware! Because this is not an update like Panda or Penguin, which added features to the existing algorithm, but is an update of the algorithm in full (which did not happen since 2010 with Caffeine).

Google claims to have put the name of Hummingbird to turn it into a “precise and fast” search engine. This change in the algorithm therefore served to show more precise results to more complex searches, placing them in a context in order to better understand what the user is looking for.

So far, Google was not a machine unable to really understand what the user was looking for. The words were just lines of characters with no connection to the object to which they are associated. But with the update, based on the Knowledge graph function, Google tried to establish those connections in order to offer the content that the user really looks for.

In this way, Google can now give answers to questions like “What year is the song of Queen Do not stop me now?”, In which users tend to formulate the phrases more naturally (especially with the emergence of voice search on mobile devices) and searches such as “Song year Queen Do not Stop Me Now” have been left behind.

PIGEON

If you are looking for “fast food restaurants” in the Google search engine, surely in the first results you will see restaurants that are very close to you. Is it Google I guess? No, but he knows very well what he does, and what he wants is to offer the most optimal results to his users; so on July 24, 2014, it released an update that was able to offer local results to the searches of its users: Pidgeon.

These changes affect both the results in the SERPS and Google Maps, giving special visibility to the web directories. Always highlighting those websites that are following an appropriate SEO strategy, from that moment the first positions will be for those pages with a notorious authority and relevance that are also located in the same geographical area as the user.

FRED

Because of the recent integration of Google algorithms into their main search algorithm, we no longer have new information about them. And therefore we no longer know with certainty what factors affect the new updates and how they will penalize.

The name of Fred is due to Gary Illyes (worker of Google), who joked about the matter and referred to him in this way; and although it is not the official name, the SEO community has decided to baptize it as such.

Since March 2017, variations in the organic positions in the search engine have been experimenting that make us suppose that there has been a new update. Our recommendation is always to follow an SEO strategy in which the quality content and the constant work of link management, contributes to our website the importance it deserves.

Google has made many changes in its algorithm in recent years to become the largest search engine worldwide. Every day we work to learn more about your algorithm and find the key points to position in the first positions for the most relevant keywords for each client. Long live Google and its algorithm updates!


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