Impulse Creative
Pandas, penguins, and pigeons – oh my! We're not talking about the wild animals here. In fact, we're referring to three of the four major Google algorithm updates. Google has made some significant algorithm changes over the past several years, and deciphering between all of them can get a little bit confusing.
Google's search algorithm is incredibly detailed and complicated. The reason for the constant updates is to try and provide searchers with the exact information they need and to provide users the best results while doing so. In the early days, marketers could easily find ways to ensure that their client's site showed up in search results. At one point, it was as simple as putting in a code on the website. Known as a meta keywords tag, this tag told search engines all about their website.
As Google evolved, its engineers became more focused on making search results as helpful to the user as possible. They found ways to stop marketers from cheating and looked for ways to show the most relevant pages at the top of search results. Today, Google's algorithm looks at hundreds of different factors.
Google has four main algorithm updates that have been released in the past few years: Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and Pigeon. Wondering what they all mean? Here's a breakdown of what each of these updates mean for your business:
Panda
Google's Panda update was first introduced in February 2011 and is meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way to the top of Google's search results. When this algorithm was first released, it was unnamed and was known as "Farmer" by many marketers since the update seemed to affect content farms. Eventually, the algorithm was renamed after one of its creators, Navneet Panda.
Prior to this update, low-quality content could, and often did, rank highly in search results. Today, the Panda update identifies and demotes low-quality pages such as content farms, thin content (content that lacks value), and duplicate content. Google continues to make updates to Panda, and it gives preference to sites that are in-depth, useful, and valuable.
Penguin
The Penguin update from Google was launched in April 2012 to better catch sites that were spamming its search results, such as those that were buying links or obtaining them through link networks in order to boost their rankings. The goal is to punish sites that have tried to cheat their way to the top of Google search results by creating unnatural backlinks.
Links are essentially a vote for your site. If a well-respected site links to your website, it's a virtual recommendation for your site. Although a small, unknown link to your site won't count as much, a large number of small votes can make a big impact. In this past, this is why marketers tried to get as many links as they could to their company's website. However, with the Penguin update, Google stopped this practice and penalized sites that had unnatural links back to their site.
Hummingbird
Unlike Penguin or Panda, Hummingbird is a whole different animal (bad pun – sorry). Google made their announcement about Hummingbird in September 2013. At the time that it was announced, the update had already been live for about a month. Although Panda or Penguin can destroy your rankings, it's highly unlikely that this would happen with Hummingbird.
The Hummingbird update allows Google to pay more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the entire sentence or phrase is taken into account rather than just certain words. Now when you type a sentence into Google, it knows exactly what you're looking for and shows results based on that phrase. The goal is to show pages that better understand the intent of a user's search phrase, rather than pages that only match a few words. Therefore, when you're creating content, it's important to create content that answers your buyer personas' questions and provides value.
Pigeon
Launched in July 2014 for U.S. search results in English, the Pigeon update provides more useful, relevant, and accurate local search results that are tied closer to traditional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this update improved their distance and location ranking parameters. This update affects the listings in the Google Local section of results that are mapped at the top of the first page of results. The goal of this update is to give users more relevant results based on their distance from a known location.
Google has released many other algorithm updates over the past several years including the Pirate, Payday, exact match domain, and mobile-friendly (Mobilegeddon) updates. However, the four listed above are the ones that are updated most frequently and have the biggest impact on Google search results. The goal of all of Google's updates is to show search results that are valuable and relevant to the user.
Whether you're an inbound marketer or business owner, taking the time to familiarize yourself with these updates will help you better understand how to make changes and recover should your website get dinged by one of the updates. Although it may feel like it, getting hit by a Google update isn't the end of the world, but it is important that you take time to fix the situation before the next update occurs so you don't continue to get dinged in search results.
Bottom line: If you focus on building links in an organic way and producing quality content that's valuable and helpful, there's less of a chance that your website will get penalized from a Google update.
Interested in learning more about SEO and inbound marketing? Download our free eBook, The Beginner's Guide to Inbound Marketing!
