Google Penguin, Panda, & Hummingbird pudates

Search engine algorithms are based on a simple premise: searchers want an answer to their queries. For any search, there are hundreds or thousands of sites that offer a potential link or insight related to the query. As a result, search engines need to accomplish three goals:

• Disqualify all the sites that aren’t relevant.
• Return a list of sites that are relevant.
• Rank and prioritize those sites in order of importance, to identify which sites are the most relevant.

Panda

Google Panda was first introduced in February 2011, and has had several smaller updates rolled out since that. Panda started the ball rolling on the content discussion, focusing on eliminating low-quality or thin sites in favor of those with in-depth, regularly updated content. Panda also tackled sites with too much advertising and poor navigation, when commercial gains were clearly prioritized over user experience. Since Panda, content marketing has increased in popularity with a focus on blogging, on-site content, building off-site content assets through practices like guest blogging, and social media participation.

Penguin

Google Penguin was the search engine’s response to so-called “black hat” SEO tactics for link building, which was first released in April 2012. Numerous updates have been rolled out since then. Manipulative link building techniques that focused on creating links through “link schemes” were targeted. These included buying links, building thin sites simply for the purpose of linking back to a main site, trading links, comment spam links, and similar tactics.

Hummingbird

Hummingbird reinforced everything that had been done through Google Panda and Penguin, but added two specific dimensions. Announced in late 2013, Hummingbird introduced the importance of mobile devices to search. For the first time, mobile responsive designs clearly have taken on increased importance. Many have argued that it’s also critical to have a mobile content strategy: that is, to assume that readers will be accessing your content from a variety of devices including smartphones and tablets and creating your content with a mobile-first mindset.