Google algorithm updates in 2020

Google Panda, Hummingbird and Penguin Updates

The following is a list of major updates that changed the SEO game completely:

• Panda (2011) – Don’t be fooled by its cuddly name. This panda is ruthless! It’s supposed to penalize websites with poor quality content by stopping them from appearing in Google’s top search results. With many websites having already felt the wrath of Panda it’s easy to see why many worry about the future of SEO.
• Penguin (2012) – Another cute animal, designed with the sole purpose to terrorize websites exhibiting a spammy behaviour (such as buying links to boost website authority).
• Hummingbird (2013) – The name comes from being “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words. Thanks to this update, Google can now understand complex phrases based on context. Hummingbird update also means that Google can now understand synonyms as well as user intent much better than it ever could.
• Pigeon (2014) – This animal is perhaps a bit more friendly. The Pigeon algorithm update is supposed to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results.
• Mobile-first update (2015) – In 2015 Google released a major update, designed to give a boost to websites that are mobile-friendly. With this update, Google is spearheading a revolution in the digital world. It represents a paradigm shift from desktop to mobile-first.
• RankBrain (2015) – Machines are taking over! One of the biggest revolutions in search engines, RankBrain is a machine learning (AI) algorithm that helps Google process and understand search queries. In short, RankBrain tweaks the algorithm on its own. Depending on the keyword, RankBrain will increase or decrease the importance of backlinks, content freshness, content length, domain authority, and other ranking factors.
• BERT (2019) – Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training. This new model recently rolled out by Google, is used to better understand natural language by processing words in relation to all other words in a sentence. BERT update helps Google consider the full context of a word and improve understanding the intent behind a search, sort of like humans can understand each other. Besides the update’s ability to help users with more useful search results, it creates a new challenge for people in the SEO industry because you can’t really optimize for BERT, at least not like before. To harness the power of BERT you need to write outstanding content that matches users’ search intent.

But, don’t be intimidated by all of this.

Google is constantly evolving itself, with between 500-600 updates and tweaks every year!

This doesn’t mean that you’ll be worse off. Most of these are minor tweaks to improve stability, reliability and user experience.

Major updates have the potential to be ‘game-changers,’ and real SEO experts constantly keep an eye out for any changes that might disrupt the industry.