{"id":2025,"date":"2012-08-06T13:00:54","date_gmt":"2012-08-06T20:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.primeview.com\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2019-07-24T16:14:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-24T23:14:25","slug":"google-algorithm-timeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/blog\/google-algorithm-timeline\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Algorithm Changes Timeline: 2011 – 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The SEO<\/a> world is in topsy-turvy again when Google recently sent out tons of new link warnings to websites. This is what the email says:<\/p>\n

\u201cDear site owner or webmaster of\u2026.<\/em>We\u2019ve detected that some of your site\u2019s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google\u2019s Webmaster Guidelines. <\/em>Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. <\/em>We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you\u2019ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google\u2019s search results. <\/em>If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. <\/em>If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then Google\u2019s Matt Cutts posted this on his Google+ on July 21 to explain the strange warning:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is now confusing the world of SEO. Was it a penalty? A warning? Or just a way to ward off hackers who hooked on innocent sites?<\/p>\n

While we\u2019re waiting for more explanations, let\u2019s take a look at the timeline of Google\u2019s Algorithm updates so far.<\/p>\n

Link Warnings – July 19, 2012<\/strong>
\nThe email above was dispatched to a lot of websites warning about unnatural links but announced later there is nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n

Panda 3.8 – June 25, 2012<\/strong>
\nA small ripple in the Panda update, it contained no algorithm changes but just revisions on the data.<\/p>\n

Panda 3.7 – June 8, 2012<\/strong>
\nAnnounced as just a small update that would barely affect 1% of queries but in truth it made more impression than Panda 3.5 and 3.6.<\/p>\n

May 39 – Pack – June 7, 2012<\/strong>
\nIt was a busy month for Google as they came out with 39 updates on Panda and Penguin in May. This includes better link-scheme detection, changes to title\/snippet rewriting and updates on Google News.<\/p>\n

Penguin 1.1 – May 25<\/strong>
\nPenguin algorithm was updated for the first time, extending its work outside of the main search index.<\/p>\n

Knowledge Graph – May 16, 2012<\/strong>
\nThe latest addition to Google, it\u2019s SERP-centric. As Google describes it, \u201cThe Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about\u2014landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more\u2014and instantly get information that\u2019s relevant to your query.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penguin – April 24, 2012<\/strong>
\nOriginally called Webspam update, the Penguin is another cute animal that has serious intents and created heavy impact on the SEO world. It\u2019s also called Panda\u2019s stricter sister. It has to do with penalties on over-optimization and adjusts spam factors like keyword stuffing.<\/p>\n

Parked Domain Bug – April 16, 2012<\/strong>
\nRanking goes awry on account of a bug named Parked Domain.<\/p>\n

Venice – February 27, 2012<\/strong>
\nGoogle tightens ship with Venice, which targets local searches.<\/p>\n

Ads Above The Fold – January 19, 2012<\/strong>
\nThis penalizes sites that had too much ad-space.<\/p>\n

Panda 3.1 – November 18, 2011<\/strong>
\nThis is when Google entered a phase that was called \u201cPanda Flux\u201d where more and more updates were rolled out.<\/p>\n

The Update – November 3, 2011<\/strong>
\nThis is the biggest update Google has done and has changed the landscape of SEO. It hit a whopping 35% of queries and released a guideline that fresh content will be prioritized over content that has no time relevance.<\/p>\n

Panda 2.5 – September 28, 2011<\/strong>
\nWhat was supposed to be a small ripple affected sites that as reported created \u201clarge scale losses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Panda 2.4 – August 12, 2011<\/strong>
\nThis is when Panda goes global to English and non-English searches save for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.<\/p>\n

Google Plus – June 28, 2011<\/strong>
\nGoogle releases its answer to Facebook with Google Plus or Google+. Within 2 weeks the social media network reached 10 million users.<\/p>\n

Panda – February 23, 2011<\/strong>
\nPanda is first released into public. It\u2019s a preview of the more massive changes Google is going to do with the SEO industry by targeting bad quality content and shady SEO linking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The SEO world is in topsy-turvy again when Google recently sent out tons of new link warnings to websites. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8732,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/single-post-full-width-banner-with-sidebar.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[57,35,36,14,52,55,53,11,12],"class_list":["post-2025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-content-marketing","tag-digital-marketing","tag-google-updates","tag-link-building","tag-local-seo","tag-on-site-optimization","tag-paid-ads","tag-seo","tag-social-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primeview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}