Infographics on major updates made to Google algorithm
Major Updates to Google Algorithm 2015-2016
September 23, 2016 – Penguin 4.0
Penguin is now real-time and now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.
September 1, 2016 – “Possum”
The main purpose of the update was to diversify the local results and also prevent spam from ranking as well. This particular update only impacted ranking in local results or Google Maps results.
May 12, 2016 – Mobile-friendly 2
Google started rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly. This update did not affect websites that were already mobile-friendly.
February 23, 2016 – 4 Top AdWords
Google changes AdWords so now 4 ads at the top of the search results, none on the sidebar at all, and an additional 3 ads at the bottom of the search results.
October 26, 2015 – RankBrain
This update uses artificial intelligence to filter results and embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand
July 17, 2015 – Panda 4.2
The rollout allowed anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update a chance to emerge if they made the right changes. The impact was not immediate, and changes and ratings happened over a few months.
April 22, 2015 –Mobile Update or “Mobilegeddon”
Google expanded the use of mobile-friendliness in ranking to affect mobile searches. There was an increase in high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.
Sources:
- https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html
- https://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/03/continuing-to-make-web-more-mobile.html
- https://www.thesempost.com/google-adwords-switching-to-4-ads-on-top-none-on-sidebar/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-26/google-turning-its-lucrative-web-search-over-to-ai-machines
- https://searchengineland.com/google-panda-4-2-is-here-slowly-rolling-out-after-waiting-almost-10-months-225850
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html
