Their motive has always been to benefit the users by providing them more value and directing them to the most relevant online result. Google is only trying its best in eliminating results that are not relevant or not useful because its users have requested it. This is the reason why the Google search algorithm has been updated many a times over the past decade.

Earlier, you could optimize a post spamming keywords all over the article and even in the white space available around any page to make it rank easily in the top 10 results. Yes! Surprised? This used to work earlier! And then I am aware of another such practice where SEO Analysts would spam backlinks from even the most irrelevant sites to have a bigger volume of backlinks to their website. The major bloggers and writers were suffered to rank well in the SERP due to such abuse of the Search Engine Algorithm.

Over the course of time, Google has filtered its search to weed out all such miscreants and webmasters who had gotten to the top of the search engine rankings through this spamdexing (“web spam”) foul play.

Google then rolled out their famous Panda

Panda marked the major change to Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011, and the effect went global in April 2011. This was intended to return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results lowering(filtering) the rank of low-quality sites (or "thin sites”).

Google Panda takes “the quality of the content” into account when ranking a site in the search results.

The sites that have lower quality content will be negatively impacted by Panda. Low-quality content that tended to rank due to sheer volume (“Content farms”) is the reason why Panda was originally launched. These sites were publishing a huge amount of low-quality content quickly on topics with very little knowledge or research, and it was obvious to a searcher who landed on one of those pages.

Panda has now evolved to be the core part of Google’s algorithm. Previously, we would know when the Panda update is going to come. Now it is released as a part of their slow rolling update, which lasts months per cycle. Due to which, now without conducting a content audit and identifying the factors that sites’ hit by Panda tend to have, it is hard to understand if a site has been negatively impacted by Panda at any point of time or not.

The second major Google algorithm is Penguin

Penguin was built for tackling web spam and targeting websites that have used corrupt tactics to manipulate the search engine rankings. Penguin, primarily, identifies the quality of links and nothing else.

There are websites that purchase links, little do they understand that these SEOs who offer link building usually acquire low-quality links through places such as low-quality directories, blog spam, or link badges and infographics. This could result in their sites failing to rank any longer for the relevant search terms.

For those who built their links in the past, while this “foul play” was still allowed but which are against Google’s webmaster guidelines now, have been impacted by Penguin’s updates. Scrappy links or any such nefarious tactics do not earn much value in the SERP any longer.

Then there is, the hummingbird!

Google Hummingbird (called so because of its speed and accuracy) is part of the main Google search algorithm and was the biggest update to their algorithm since 2010 "Caffeine" search architecture upgrade. So how Hummingbird is different from other algorithms? Unlike others, it is not specifically a spam targeting algorithm. Rather, this algorithm ensured that they serve the best results for specific queries. It allows the search engine a better understanding of the concepts and relationships between keywords.

Hummingbird gives more weightage to high-quality content which provides answers to the question the searcher is asking for (whether it is implied or not) and, also reads well to the searcher. Google intends to provide high-quality results for the longer queries. Hummingbird cannot be optimized for, outside of optimizing for the rise of conversational search. Longer search queries, such as what we see with voice search, and the types of queries that searchers tend to do on mobile are often highlighted with a conversational search.

Optimizing for conversational search isn’t that difficult. Just make sure your content is highly readable and can answer those longer tail queries as well as shorter tail ones. Hummingbird impacts long-tailed search queries in a similar way to how RankBrain is also helping those types of queries.

Google has always thrived to provide more value to its users and will continue to do the same. Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. Although most of these changes are minor, it occasionally rolls out a "major" algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways.

It is not a good practice to publish content just for the heck of traffic and to get some impressions and clicks to the ads. How can we rank better on the SERP then? Be more mindful of the things that you publish! Make sure it’s unique, original and helpful!

With Penguin and Panda, Google is taking down the websites with poor quality content, unnatural links or any other items that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Most of all, Google is making search more refined and effective for its users.

For the time being, it will be a while before Google opens gate to another of its animals. 

Saurabh Prakash Mishra

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