So it’s again time to say good bye to another year and welcome another new year. And while we are bracing ourselves to make it for another new year, let’s take a quick glimpse of what ruled and rocked SEOs in 2013 in the same way as we did last year where we saw major SEO updates in 2012.
17th January – Link Devaluation: Although Google’s official sources denied, wide community of webmasters believed that Google’s first major algorithm update of the year 2013 was reportedly rolled out on January 17th which saw significant impact and fluctuation in rankings in many websites.
22nd January – Panda V.24: A few days after big chatter among webmasters over the web about Google’s first (unofficial) update, Google announced its very first algorithm update for the year 2013 on 22nd January which impacted 1.20% of English queries. This was Google Panda’s 24 update!
14th March – Panda V.25: Within 15 days of refreshing Panda algorithm, Google did push another update to it on 14th March. Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts singled about this change at West SMX and commented that the possible update would be last to their last update to Panda.
22nd May – Penguin 2.0: Shifting its update cycle from Panda to Penguin, Google rolled out Penguin 2.0 to take a big hit on webspam in SERPs.
11th June – Payday Loan: Hitting back at suspicious and spamming payday loan sites, Google rolled out a major update to clean up payday loans and also targeted porn content on their SERPs
11th June – Panda Dance: On the very same day, Google pushed a slow, rolling out update to its Panda algorithm. It is believed that this rolling out update took 10 days to completely roll out.
18th July – Panda Recovery: In a surprising u-turn, webmasters noticed their panda hit sites being free from effects
19th July – Knowledge Graph Expansion: Google also updated its Knowledge Graph algorithm to display more information in SERPs. The Knowledge Graph results increased by 50% in SERPs.
06th August – In-depth Articles: Adding a new dimension to news search results, Google introduced In-depth Articles where it shows more evergreen, long-form content. In-depth Articles show more in-depth, research based quality content in SERPs and are not part of organic result counts.
26th September – Hummingbird: On the eve of Google turning 15, the search engine giant Google launched Hummingbird – this year’s so far biggest search algorithm update putting main focus on long tail, conversational search queries in SERPs. The update was so big that it affected about 90% of English queries on Google.
04th October – Penguin 2.1: Waking up the sleeping penguin, Google rolled out an update to Penguin. However this was not a major update to the algorithm itself but a data update.
In a nutshell, the year 2013 passed not much differently compared to the year 2012 with major ups and downs for SEOs. Let’s brace up for another year and hope the year 2014 brings all new happiness to us.
Happy New Year!
[Source: SEOMoz]
