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In the SEO world, Google algorithm updates are big news. They often have a big impact for sites that can be felt for months, or in some cases, years later. But for those who don’t spend a lot of time on SEO, or are new to the industry, keeping track of every algorithm can get pretty confusing — they have funny names and it’s not always clear what each one does. Lucky for you, in this article we’ll go over the major Google algorithms, what they do and how you can avoid incurring the wrath of a panda, penguin or hummingbird.
But first, what do we mean when we say "algorithm"? To boil down the Wikipedia definition, an algorithm is “a computer’s way of figuring out which steps to take to complete a task.” In Google’s instance, its algorithms decide what steps it takes to find pages relevant to keywords used in a search, and in what order it should display those pages.
PageRank is part of the original core of Google’s search algorithm, and is considered a big factor that differentiated Google from its early competitors such as Lycos and AltaVista. Developed in the ‘90s by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, this algorithm works to determine the importance of a page or domain by counting and evaluating the links pointing at it, and then giving it a relative score between 0 and 10.
It operates based on the idea that links operate as endorsements of a page, domain or content, so the more links a page has, the better it is. According to Google:
PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important it is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.
So if you spend a lot of time working on link building, or a lot of time dealing with emails from people looking for links, you have PageRank to thank.
Note that Google used to provide PageRank as part of Google Toolbar, but stopped updating it years ago and finally removed it entirely in 2016. However, that doesn’t mean PageRank stopped being important. Links are still one of the top ranking factors.
Panda
What Is Panda?
In the old days, websites could consistently publish lots of short articles (just a few hundred words or less) with links pointing back to their site (often using exact match anchor text) across numerous article websites that would accept submissions, many without even looking at the quality of the content. The trick was to slightly change longer pieces and republish them (a process known as article spinning) or even blatantly plagiarize content in an attempt to appear at the top of search results. These websites were called "content farms" and could rank very well. The problem, from Google’s perspective, was that these websites didn’t help users find what they were looking for. They damaged Google’s user experience. Introduced in February 2011, Google’s Panda update was essentially a filter applied to search results to weed out those sites with low quality content. How does Google define low quality?
Thin: Research has shown that Google likes long content: the average page ranked in the top ten search results has almost 2,000 words. Of course that number isn’t some sort of requirement, but what it means is that the Panda algorithm is looking for content that has enough depth to provide its users with the most information or best experience.
Duplicate: There’s not really a "duplicate penalty" from Panda, but publishing the same content as other sites, or publishing the same thing on multiple pages across your own site, will still significantly impact your ability to rank. If your content is similar enough, you run the risk of being left out of search results altogether.
Over-Optimized: A big part of the problem with pre-Panda content was that many of those content farms published articles that were obviously written to help the linked pages to rank for certain keywords. That meant high keyword and synonym density with low user friendliness and usefulness.
The results were noticeable, to say the least. Here’s traffic for one site that got hit by Panda:
Yikes.
Avoiding Panda Problems
So how do you stay on Google’s good side when it comes to content? Well, the obvious answer is to publish quality content. A good content strategy is to focus on publishing evergreen content, which by definition is high quality, in-depth and adds value for visitors. Not everything you publish will gain enough traction to truly become evergreen, but following the evergreen content guide will help you create in-depth, unique and naturally optimized articles that generally rank well.
However, just being a good writer is not always enough. Depending on what type of site you have, you could have a problem with duplicate content and not even know it. This is particularly common with content management systems, syndicated content, e-commerce shopping cart systems, international sites, search/filter features and pagination. You’ll have to use some technical know-how to deal with these types of duplicate content issues.
Penguin
What Is Penguin?
Since links have always been such an important part of ranking in Google SERPs, SEOs have spent a lot of time and effort developing ways to build links. Even though PageRank took linking domain quality into account when scoring a page, building a huge number of lower quality links could very quickly add up and surpass sites that had links from fewer, better sites. This resulted in some link building techniques that were slightly less than white hat:
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