google pigeon updateGoogle has issued many quality and algorithm updates over the years. The goals of their updates and algorithm changes seem to be an attempt to clean up their index as they try to remove poor quality sites and spam content and retain useful information that is helpful to website users and visitors. We will touch on a few of the major updates and changes in this article.

For a more comprehensive list, please see this extensive and excellent article from Moz covering just about every update and algorithm change in Google’s history.

Google Algorithm Updates Change – History Refresher

Just visit this page for the article from Moz==>Moz Google Algorithm Changes.

Mobilegeddon – The Google Mobile Friendly Update – April 2015

This was a mobile friendly ranking algorithm designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages. I’m not sure if this has lived up to all of the hype :/ As of August 2016 Google has removed their mobile friendly label from the search results. Stay tuned…

Google Pigeon Update – July 2014

Promises more accurate & relevant local search results with regards to location and distance ranking parameters.

Google Penguin Update = April 2012

Targeted sites buying bad links mainly through PBN’s or Private Blog Networks.
This resulted in the closing of many PBN’s and the removal of bad links using the Google disavow links tool.

Google EMD Update (Exact Match Update) September 2012

Designed to stop low quality websites from ranking simply because they have ranking keywords in their domain name. Example: cheapautoinsurance

Google Panda Update – Feb 2011

Addressed websites with poor quality content.