The reality of online marketing is that few people scroll past the first couple of suggested websites that appear when they type a word into a search engine. To maximise your digital presence, you need to occupy those top positions.
Doing so is no easy task, particularly if you are in a competitive industry. It takes considerable skill, knowledge of SEO (search engine optimisation) practices, and most importantly — time — to improve your search engine result rankings. This is why many companies opt to outsource their online marketing to an external company that provides SEO services in Melbourne, whose job it is to understand Google’s algorithm and the effect it has on your website’s standing and reach.
It’s important to keep in mind that Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm — up to hundreds per year. The aim of these changes is to improve user experience, ensuring that online searchers get the most accurate and relevant results possible. Understanding the major changes that have occurred throughout Google’s history and how they have impacted SEO rankings is important for any company looking to improve their online presence.
Significant algorithm updates
As mentioned, Google updates their algorithm hundreds of times per year. Only a handful of these updates have a noticeable impact on SEO rankings. However, a select few throughout Google’s history have had a huge effect on the digital marketing industry, completely changing the SEO game.
Panda (2011)
Panda is considered by many to be the first major Google algorithm update. The goal of the Panda update was to prevent websites that had poor quality content reaching the top of the search engine results pages. Following Panda, websites were assigned a ‘quality classification’ that had a direct impact on their ranking.
The websites that were hardest hit by this update were known as ‘content farms’. These websites published thousands of low-quality articles per day that were not relevant to humans but were trying to manipulate Google’s bots to improve rankings.
Penguin (2012)
Closely related to the Panda update, Penguin was designed to penalise those websites that were manipulating link-building practices in order to elevate their search results and rankings.
When talking about SEO, the term ‘black-hat’ is often used. Black-hat practices are those that are unethical and spammy, such as buying links. Links play a considerable role in determining a website’s ranking — generally speaking, the greater the number of high-quality links pointing towards your website, the better your search engine results will be.
However, Google is explicit in stating that wherever possible these links should be gained either organically or through established link-building practices (known as ‘white-hate SEO’) — not by purchasing links. Penguin was designed to help facilitate this.
Hummingbird (2013)
Hummingbird is often described as the first complete overhaul of Google’s algorithm. While Panda and Penguin resulted in significant changes to search engine results pages, Hummingbird was a core update that fundamentally changed how the algorithm worked.
Through Hummingbird, Google signalled its commitment to providing contextual answers to users’ queries. This is known as semantic search — the ability of a search engine to understand the intent behind a query, not simply provide information relating to individual keywords.
Mobile (2015)
By 2015, smartphones had well and truly made their mark known. Some might say that Google was even a little late to the game in announcing the 2015 ‘Mobile’ algorithm update.
The Mobile update reflected changing user search patterns. While we had previously relied on laptops and desktop computers to search online, more and more people were browsing using their smartphones. The problem was that many websites were not optimised for the small screen.
Google made several changes to their algorithm that rewarded those websites that had a fast mobile page load and a layout that was easy to read on a hand-held device.
RankBrain (2015)
By 2015, artificial intelligence (AI) was beginning to play a significant role in how Google interpreted and responded to user queries. The RankBrain update reflects this.
Prior to 2015, an estimated 15 percent of user queries that were typed in Google were completely new to the algorithm — that is to say, they had never been typed into Google before. This is quite a significant number of searches. For each new term, Google was forced to guess what the user was searching for and it often fell short.
Following the RankBrain update, Google’s algorithms were able to confidently understand new search terms. How does it do this? Well, it’s a little complicated and requires some knowledge of AI and machine learning technologies. All you need to know is that RankBrain significantly improved the search experience and forced SEO experts to reevaluate how they conducted keyword research.
BERT (2019)
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. What does that mean?
Well, BERT is another form of AI technology that is designed to better understand what sentences mean. Google estimated that the BERT update would impact 10 percent of all searches, particularly those that are complex and dependent on context. It was designed to provide a natural search experience and represents the future of Google’s algorithm.
2021 Core Update
Most recently Google released the first half of a two-part core algorithm update in June 2021. The second half of this update is expected to be rolled out in the following weeks. The exact implications of this core update are yet to be determined, and it will probably be some time before website owners and SEO experts understand exactly what changes Google have made. What we do know is that it was a ‘core update’. What does this mean? Well, a core update is a significant change to the way Google’s algorithms operate, which can have wide-spread impacts on SEO rankings.
There you have it! A short overview of Google’s most significant algorithm updates.
With hundreds of updates a year, it can seem like an impossible task to try and guess what Google is going to do next. However, if you keep in mind that the goal of the search engine is to provide users with relevant, quality, and authoritative information, the task becomes a lot easier.
If you’re looking to hire a team that provides SEO services in Melbourne, have a chat to them about their experience and understanding of Google’s algorithm. The quality of their response is a surefire way of knowing whether you are working with a team of SEO experts or imposters!
