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Recently, SEOmoz released a new topic about the changes in Google algorithm. Every upgrade from 2000 to 2011 is listed in detail, as follows:
Google changes its algorithm up to 500-600 times every year, but many changes are very small. But every few months, Google will make a relatively large algorithm upgrade, and these upgrades will directly affect search ranking results.
As a search engine marketer, understanding these algorithm changes will help you analyze changes in website rankings and traffic. Below we have listed several algorithm upgrades that have a relatively large impact. Being familiar with these algorithm changes will help you. SEO work.
2000
December 2000 – Google Toolbar
Google released its browser toolbar. It was the green bar (PR value) on this toolbar that made countless webmasters crazy about it in the future, and even formed a buying and selling industry chain. After the "Google Dance" every three months, what webmasters are most concerned about is whether the green bar has grown longer.
Official news from Google: Google Launches The Google Toolbar
2003
February 2003 – Boston
An algorithm upgrade that was officially named at the Search Engine Strategy Conference (SES) held in Boston that year was also Google's first named algorithm upgrade. At first, Google mainly upgraded on a monthly basis, so the first few upgrades were a combination of some algorithm changes and inclusion refreshes (Google Dance). As upgrades became more frequent, monthly upgrade plans quickly died out.
April 2003 – Cassandra
An upgrade released by Google to address some basic external link quality issues, such as the value of a large number of links obtained from the same domain name being reduced. In addition, Cassandra also performs targeted processing on hidden text and links.
Related stories: Google – Update “Cassandra” is here
May 2003 – Dominic
In May 2003, Google made a number of upgrade changes. It is not clear which parameters Dominic upgraded. Google's "vertical" and "horizontal" spiders "Freshbot" and "Deepcrawler" crawl the entire web. Google's way of calculating external links seems to have undergone great changes.
Related stories: Understanding Dominic – Part 2
June 2003 – Esmerelda
This upgrade is the last in Google's monthly upgrade plan, and Google's upgrades will be more frequent in the future. "Google Dance" was also replaced by "Everflux". Esmerelda is mainly a centralized upgrade of the search architecture.
Related stories: Google Update Esmeralda
July 2003 – Fritz
"Google Dance" comes to an end with Fritz's upgrade. The previous monthly index upgrades were replaced by daily index changes.
Related coverage: Explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes
September 2003 – Supplemental Index
In order to add more content without destroying the original interface, Google has incorporated some results into "supplemental" links. And the meaning of entering “supplemental” has quickly become a hot topic of SEO discussion. Until Matt came out to refute the rumors in 2006, the result was still inconclusive...
Related stories: Search Engine Size Wars & Google's Supplemental Results
November 2003 – Florida
This upgrade is mainly aimed at some now outdated black hat cheating techniques, such as keyword stuffing, etc. – these were very popular SEO methods at the time. The rankings of many websites have plummeted, causing outrage and surprise.
Related stories: What Happened To My Site On Google?
2004
January 2004 – Austin
Florida has done a cleanup on some ancient black hat technologies, and some of the missed areas have been continued by the Austin upgrade. Austin punishes some possible single-page optimization behaviors, including hidden text, stacking of Meta tags, etc. Some people speculate that Google is implementing its "Hilltop" algorithm to pay more attention to the relevance of content.
Related coverage: The latest on update Austin (Google's January update)
April 2004 – Brandy
Google has released a large number of upgrades and changes this time, including an increase in the number of indexes, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an emphasis on anchor text relevance, and "link neighbors (sites that link to your website)" "etc. The application of LSI marks that Google has entered a new stage in semantic and keyword analysis technology.
Related coverage: Google's Brandy Update Exposed
August 2004 – Google ipO
This is not an algorithm upgrade, but a major event in Google's history. Google went public in 2004, issuing 19.6 million shares, with an initial share price of $85. This period of history can be said to be quite difficult. The listing did not go as smoothly as expected. Both the stock price and the shares were reduced by 25% from the original plan, but later... you know.
Related coverage: Google IPO priced at $85 a share
2005
January 2005 – Nofollow
In order to deal with Spam and control link quality, the three giants Google, Yahoo, and Bing jointly launched the Nofollow tag. Nofollow helps remove useless spam links, including spam blog comments, etc. The introduction of Nofollow has greatly affected the idea of building external links. But so far, no one has a unified conclusion on the meaning of the Nofollow tag.
Related reports: Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links
February 2005 – Allegra
Webmasters noticed fluctuations in rankings, but the exact factors were unclear. Some people believe that Allegra is involved in the "sandbox effect", some believe that Google's "Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)" is working, and some believe that Google is penalizing those "suspicious" links.
Related coverage: Google's Feb. 2005 Update
May 2005 – Bourbon
"GoogleGuy" (Matt Cutts and others) claimed that Google is making 3.5 upgrades to search quality. No one knows what the 0.5 refers to, but many people speculate that Bourbon mainly deals with repetitive content and URL standardization.
Related stories: Google Update “Bourbon”
June 2005 – xml Sitemaps
Google allows users to submit XML sitemaps in the webmaster tools backend, mainly to help search engines include them. Google's XML map files are now standard on websites.
Related stories: New “Google Sitemaps” Web Page Feed Program
June 2005 – Personalized Search
Unlike previous personalized searches based on your settings, this upgrade mainly uses your historical search data. Even if you are not logged in to your account and have not made personalized settings, your historical search records will affect your search results. This also explains many people’s doubts about the different search results when changing machines.
Related stories: Google Relaunches Personal Search – This Time, It Really Is Personal
September 2005 – Gilligan
It seemed like a "false alarm". Webmasters discovered the change in rankings, but Google said it had not upgraded its algorithm recently. Matt Cutts published a blog about this, saying that Google's ranking changes every day, but the PR value and other parameters of the toolbar only change every three months.
Related reports: What?s an update?
October 2005 – Google Local/Maps
Since launching the Local Business Center in March 2005 and encouraging merchants to upload their information, Google has integrated Maps into LBC. This integration has had some impact on local SEO optimization.
Related stories: Google Merges Local and Maps Products
October 2005 – Jagger
This is a relatively large upgrade launched by Google, which mainly targets some low-quality external links, including reciprocal links, link farms, paid links, etc. Operation Jagger lasted for at least three months, from September to November, with October having the greatest impact.
Related stories: A Review Of The Jagger 2 Update
November 2005 – Big Daddy
Related reports: Indexing timeline
2006
November 2006 – Supplemental Update
Google will add Supplemental links after some search results. Is it a good thing or a bad thing when your website content becomes "supplemental content" for others? This result is inconclusive, but Matt later said that entering Supplemental is not a punishment for the website, nor is it a bad thing. . . Still inconclusive!
Related coverage: Confusion Over Google's Supplemental Index
December 2006 – False Alarm
There are some discussions on the Internet that after the ranking changes in November, there was another algorithm upgrade in December, but Google stated that there were no major changes.
Related stories: Google Update Debunked By Matt Cutts
2007
May 2007 – Universal Search
Gone are the traditional 10-result interface, and Google will include more content in its search results, including news, videos, pictures, local information and other content.
Related coverage: Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
June 2007 – Buffy
To pay tribute to Vanessa Fox's departure, Google has made a "Buffy" upgrade. Many people don't know what exactly has been changed in this upgrade. Matt Cutts said that Buffy is a concentrated upgrade for some small changes.
Related stories: Google “Buffy” Update – June Google.com Update
2008
April 2008 – Dewey
At the end of March and the beginning of April, Google's rankings experienced a big fluctuation, but the factors involved were unknown. Some people suspect that Google has begun to promote its own services (monopolies like Baidu), such as Google Books, but there are no obvious signs. The name Dewey comes from Matt Cutt, who asked users to add this word when he was collecting user feedback on this upgrade.
Related coverage: Google's Cutts Asking for Feedback on March/April '08 Update
August 2008 – Google Suggest
When users enter keywords in the search box, Google will give search suggestions in the form of a drop-down box. Google Suggest was later upgraded to Google Instant, which has more powerful functions.
Related stories: Google.com Finally Gets Google Suggest Feature
2009
February 2009 – Vince
This upgrade of Google seems to have a soft spot for big brands, and some big brands occupy excellent rankings. Matt Cutts claims that "Vince" is just a relatively minor change, but many people think that this is an upgrade with long-term impact.
Related stories: Google's Vince Update Produces Big Brand Rankings; Google Calls It A Trust “Change”
February 2009 – Rel-canonical Tag (URL standardized tag)
Google, Yahoo and Bing jointly announced support for the new tag: Canonical. This tag allows webmasters to express standardized URL information to search engines without affecting user usage.
Related reports: Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes
August 2009 – Caffeine (Beta)
Google has launched a preview version of its new search architecture. The new architecture can increase crawling speed, increase indexing volume, and enable real-time inclusion and sorting. Caffeine was officially launched in June 2010.
Related reports: Help test some next-generation infrastructure
December 2009 – Real-time Search
The results of this real-time search include Twitter news sources (now canceled), Google News, latest included content and other information sources. And these sources are expanding all the time, including a lot of social media information.
Related stories: Google Launches Real Time Search Results
2010
April 2010 – Google Places
Although Google launched the "Places" page in September 2009, it was only as part of Google Maps. This time Places has been re-upgraded and its name has been changed to "Local Business Center", which is more closely integrated with local search results and also adds some new features, including local advertising options.
Related stories: Introducing Google Places
May 2010 – May Day
In late April and early May, webmasters mainly noticed that the traffic of many long-tail keywords dropped significantly. Matt Cutts later confirmed that "May Day" is an algorithm upgrade by Google for long-tail keywords. Many websites with low-quality content have been hit, especially some e-commerce websites. This upgrade is also a harbinger of Operation Panda.
Related stories: Video: Google's Matt Cutts On May Day Update
June 2010 – Caffeine (officially launched)
After several months of testing, Google officially launched the caffeine indexing system. The introduction of caffeine not only speeds up Google's search speed, but also greatly improves indexing. New content can be included faster, which also lays the foundation for the future Panda algorithm.
Related reports: Our new search index: Caffeine
SEO in the Post-Panda Era – Long-tailed Panda Drinking Caffeine
August 2010 – Brand Update
Google allows the same domain name to appear multiple times in search results. To put it simply, in the past search results, the same website often only displayed one or two pieces of content in the search results, but this upgrade allows the content of the same website to be displayed multiple times, as long as the content is OK.
Related stories: Google Search Results Dominated By One Domain
September 2010 – Google Instant
For an expanded upgrade of "Google Suggest", Google Instant allows users to instantly see the corresponding results when they enter keywords in the search box, without having to click the "Search" button, which is the ultimate in simplicity. This upgrade mainly targets search behavior and does not have much impact on the ranking of search results.
Related stories: About Google Instant
November 2010 – Instant Previews
Google has added a magnifying glass icon to the right of its search results return entries, allowing users to preview websites directly on the Google results page. This feature upgrade shows Google's renewed focus on the quality, design and ease of use of Landing Pages, and it also causes SEO workers to pay attention to these factors.
Related stories: Beyond Instant Results: Instant Previews
December 2010 – Negative Reviews
After the New York Times reported on the way DecorMyEyes used negative reviews (frequent exposure) on various websites and forums to improve its rankings, Google improved its algorithm standards in response to this cheating method.
Related stories: Being bad to your customers is bad for business
December 2010 – Social Signals
Both Google and Bing confirmed that they will use social factors as the basis for new rankings, including data from Facebook and Twitter. Matt Cutts This is a relatively new development for Google, although all SEO practitioners have been looking forward to it for quite some time.
Related stories: Google Webmaster Video Reconfirms Use Of Social Signals
2011
January 2011 – Overstock Punishment
Overstock was punished by Google: it was also a preview of Operation Panda. This news also caused relatively large fluctuations in the country. Then in February, the equally famous brand JCPenney also suffered punishment. These two actions to reduce the rights of large-scale brand sites are warm-up for the launch of Panda Action.
Related story: Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics
January 2011 – Attribution Update
In response to the increasingly rampant spam content, Google has made algorithm upgrades for original content as well as distribution and collection of content. According to Matt Cutts, this upgrade affects 2% of search results. This upgrade is a precursor to Operation Panda.
Related reports: Algorithm Change Launched
February 2011 – Panda Algorithm/Content Farm
This is the largest algorithm upgrade made by Google this year, and it has attracted common attention around the world. According to official Google data, this upgrade affected 12% of search results. The Panda algorithm mainly targets low-quality content, content farms, excessive advertising content, and other quality factors. This upgrade has had a very significant impact on some large sites.
Related reports: 25 well-known sites that died under Google’s new algorithm
March 2011 – +1 button
Before the launch of Plus, Google launched its +1 button, similar to Facebook's Like or Twitter's Tweets. This button can not only be used by users on their websites, but also directly integrated into search results (including natural results and AdWords ads), allowing users to more personalized recommendations for the content they need and affecting their entire social circles (Circles). ) ranking.
Related reports: Google+1 button officially released
April 2011 – Panda 2.0
Google "panda-izes" all English search results around the world, not just "English-speaking countries" in the past. This upgrade also adds some new ranking factors, citing user behavior towards search results as ranking factors, such as blocking of certain search results.
Related reports: Panda 2.2 is coming, please pay attention
May 2011 – Panda 2.1
Originally called "Panda 3.0" by webmasters, it was another upgrade by Google based on 2.0. The changes and impacts of this upgrade are relatively small, so there are less discussions among webmasters.
Related stories: It's Panda Update 2.1, Not Panda 3.0, Google Says
June 2011 – Schema.org
The three search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft jointly launched a new universal markup vocabulary set based on Microdata format. Aiming to display richer search results through these common Microdata.
Related coverage: About HTML5 vs. Schema.org – Is it the standard for the next generation of SEO?
June 2011 – Panda 2.2
Panda 2.2 was officially confirmed by Google at the SMX conference. Since the launch of Panda, Google has been continuously improving and upgrading the algorithm. According to Cutt, this upgrade is mainly for content that has been collected and copied, and this upgrade is manually enabled.
Related stories: Official: Google Panda Update 2.2 Is Live
June 2011 – Google+
After many social products were eliminated from the market, Google finally launched its blockbuster product: Google Plus, targeting Facebook directly. Google+ is characterized by content sharing in the form of circles and is closely integrated with other Google products, such as Gmail. The launch of G+ quickly gained popularity among users. In just two weeks, the number of users reached 10 million.
Related reports: Google’s attacks on both sides – Plus targets Facebook and Twitter
July 2011 – Panda 2.3
Webmasters began to debate whether Google's Panda algorithm has been upgraded again. Search Engine Land finally received confirmation from Google: "This upgrade is one of our annual 500-word algorithm changes." It is not yet clear whether new ranking factors have been added in this upgrade, or whether it is just a simple upgrade of the original ranking factors and data.
Related reports: Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live
August 2011 – Panda Goes Global
Panda (Panda algorithm) is deployed globally. In addition to Chinese, Japanese and Korean websites, the search structures of all other languages have been Pandaized. Google reports that this upgrade will affect the ranking of search results in 6-9% of the countries where it is deployed.
Related coverage: High-quality sites algorithm launched in additional languages
August 2011 – 12-pack Sitelinks
Google's Sitelinks expand to 12. Generating Sitelink on Google has always been the dream of SEO workers, because it marks the degree of recognition and branding of the website by Google. On August 16, Google announced on its official blog that its Sitelinks algorithm has been improved. The number of new Sitelinks has been increased to 12, and the format includes: page title, URL and introduction. Similar to normal search results, this is more helpful for users to find popular content on the website.
Related stories: The evolution of sitelinks: expanded and improved
Original address: Google Algorithm Change History
Chinese compilation: Shenzhen SEO – http://www.520566.net/
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