Summary of the major Google updates for 2014

Webmasters and SEOs have to remain constantly updated with the ongoing updates in the industry, whether the changes are major or minor.

2014 have been the year of algorithm changes. There are numerous updates have been rolled out in this year. Let’s take a look at the major Google updates of 2014 for making predictions for the year 2015.

Google Top Heavy Update — February 6, 2014

“Top Heavy Update” also called “Page Layout Update” that was initially rolled out in January 2012. Google refreshed page layout Algorithm and penalized the site having excessive ads above the fold.

Payday Loan 2.0 — May 16, 2014

This update was basically to target Spammy queries.  This algorithm update impacted to the different languages. Payday Loan 2.0  had affected 0.3% of U.S. search queries.

Google Panda Update 4.0 — May 19, 2014

Google Panda update 4.0 (26^th Panda update) rolled out to punish the website with poor quality content. This Panda update had impacted 7.5% of English search queries.

Payday Loan 3.0 — June 12, 2014

After a less than a month of Payday Loan 2.0 update, Google launched another major iteration. The third version of the Google spam algorithm has targeted spammy queries rather than specific sites.

Authorship Photo Drop — June 28, 2014

Google started removing the Authorship photos from the search results to make the mobile experience better by adding consistency in visual design in desktop and mobile search results. This change has been announced on 25th June 2014 and started implementing after 3 days on 28th June.

Pigeon Update — July 24, 2014

Pigeon update is a local search algorithm update that was designed to provide more accurate, relevant, useful local search result. This update has improved the distance and location rankings parameters. The real estate market has badly affected by this update. The update emphasizes on local business rather than the local brands and gives more important to local directory websites.

HTTP/SSL Certificate Update — August 6, 2014

In this update, Google has declared that they would emphasis on the websites integrated SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption to their website. They would give a small boost up in the rankings to the website having SSL encryption.  However, a very less impact was made in SERP.

Authorship Removed — August 28, 2014

Google decided to remove Authorship Photos and Google+ view count from the SERPs. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller stated in his post that they are trying to clean up the visual design of search results. This change was basically rolled out for best mobile search experience.

Panda Update 4.1— September 23, 2014

Google Panda update 4.1 was a significant update Of Panda series. This is the 27^th version of Google Panda updates.  As most of the people are aware of Panda updates in the industry that it aims to target low-quality content. Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far has announced on his Google plus about this update. Panda 4.0 has affected around 7.5% of all English search queries.

Penguin Update 3.0 — October 17, 2014

Pierre Far – Webmaster Trends Analyst has announced this Penguin update 3.0 on 17^th Oct 2014 after a one year of releasing 2.1 penguin update to target spammy queries. This update impacted less than 1% of English search queries. This update has helped the websites which were affected by previous Penguin updates and made the efforts to recover.

Pirate Update 2.0 — October 21, 2014

The original update is DMCA/”Pirate” was pushed in August 2012. After two years. Update This update was to target the sites with lot of copyright infringement reports.