The Florida update changed the landscape of search forever. It was launched just before the Christmas shopping season and affected many websites. Because the algorithm was based on a new methodology, it skewed results, causing innocent websites to lose rankings. As a result, Google began actively looking for and rectifying the problem.
Whether the update affected your website or not, it is crucial to monitor and understand its impact on your site’s ranking. Google has made numerous changes to its algorithms throughout the years, and some of these changes affect the way your site appears in SERPs. In order to determine how these changes may affect your site, you must learn about history of google updates.
Historically, the Google updates have had a significant effect on the ranking of websites. In the past, search engine results were based on the keywords a user typed in. However, with the recent addition of the Hummingbird update, Google began taking user intent into consideration. Previously, Google matched search queries with results based on relevance, but this update changed the landscape for semantic search forever.
In 2016, Google launched two major updates within a week. These updates were unnamed, and many marketing experts debated the impact of these updates. In 2017, the company incorporated an intrusive interstitial penalty to penalize websites with intrusive popups. During the same time, the company rolled out the Penguin 4.0 algorithm update, which included numerous important updates. This change made search rankings more page-specific and sitewide.
Google also released supplemental algorithm updates. These changes incorporated features that were known as Panda facts and position features. Google also introduced Google’s Instant Algorithm in September 2010. It showed search results as a user typed in the inquiry. It also introduced the Caffeine (Rollout) Algorithm Update, which increased Google’s rare speed and combined indexation and crawling more effectively.
In the summer of 2017, Google launched a new jobs portal. The new platform features a stand-alone 3-pack of job listings, which scraped data from the likes of Glassdoor, Monster, and CareerBuilder. During this time, Google lowered the PageRank scores of some websites. In some cases, this update may lead to a penalty or the removal of a website from the search results.
After the March 2019 core algorithm update, the business introduced the BERT upgrade, which will make Google’s search results more human-like. The new algorithm is designed to target websites that have been subjected to an excessive number of DMCA takedown requests, but it will have no effect on the vast majority of websites. In addition to Panda, Google released the Pirate Update #2, which targeted websites that contained content that had been illegally downloaded.
In addition to this, Google is working to make its search results more user-friendly on mobile devices. Since more than half of all searches are conducted on mobile phones, the company wants to make sure that its search results are optimised for use with mobile gadgets. If a site isn’t mobile-friendly, it can lead to a loss of trust among mobile users.
