Google updates are notoriously known to be a double-edged sword. While they offer optimization and all sorts of exciting new features, and are meant to improve the user experience, they also destroy methods for maintaining rankings for businesses that had lots of hard work put into them. In this post, we present the 11 most important updates of the last decade, bringing massive change with them, starting in 2011.
2011: Panda
The “Panda” update was the end of the keyword craze. The quality of the content moved into focus for the first time with this update and websites that only listed keywords were penalized. The deciding factor for the ranking position was an internal evaluation of the websites. As to be expected, particularly popular websites ended up ranking highly.
2012: Penguin
Next, thanks to the help of the “Penguin” update, spam links were largely eliminated. Until then, only the frequency that a link was posted was important for a good ranking. The idea was: whatever was posted frequently must be good. So began the birth of spamming. Heading into the future, not only the quantity of the link would be evaluated, but also the quality of the link.
2012: Page Layout
In this same year, the Page Layout update also brought about many changes. This update penalized pages that included too much advertising. The user experience of the search engine should be improved significantly thanks to this update.
2013: Hummingbird
Google considered the “Hummingbird” update to be a particularly big one. This update enabled the search engine to better understand relationships between texts, so this was the beginning of text comprehension for Google (instead of just filtering out single specific words). For example, Google could now distinguish between websites that were stuffed senselessly with important keywords to get clicks and websites that actually posted content for their customers.
2014: Pigeon
In Google’s update in 2014, the location of the search query was included in the search results for the first time. This was the birth of local search, which from now on also showed users where the nearest fishing supply store was located in their immediate vicinity, for example.
2015: Mobilegeddon
Since more and more users visit websites on their mobile devices, the search engine was supposed to become more mobile-friendly thanks to the Mobilegeddon update. This of course just caused chaos right off the bat, as many webmasters had not yet set their sites up for mobile devices, which caused a move further down the rankings.
2015: Rankbrain
The Rankbrain update was also implemented in 2015. Here, the relevance of the content was more in focus in search results; plus, AI was also used for the first time. The algorithm was thereby “taught”, so to say, which criteria it needed to consider for the evaluation of search results.
2017: Fred
The Fred update was not confirmed by Google. Suspicions suggest that it was aimed at identifying websites that did not offer users any added value.
2019: Bert
Bert is among Google’s biggest updates. It aimed to ensure that Google was able to better understand long-tail search queries and also display better results for long-tail search queries. Accordingly, the update was meant to bring the algorithm closer to human language.
2020: Google Core
The Google Core update came in May 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exact goal of this update has yet to be confirmed. However, it is supposed to be related to the quality standards (E-A-T): Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
2020: Google Core
A few months later, a second update was implemented. Webpages with little content were penalized. Webpages from the economy, industry, beauty, fitness, and internet/telecommunication sectors performed better after this.
