THE GOOGLE ZOO: PANDA & PENGUIN
Two major algorithmic updates – Panda in 2011 and Penguin in
2012 – had a big impact on SEO that is still being felt to this day,
as Google once again attempted to clean up its search results and
reward high-quality sites.
In 2011, Google found its search results facing severe scrutiny
because so-called “content farms” (websites that produced high
volumes of low-quality content) were dominating the search results.
Google’s SERPs were also cluttered with websites featuring
unoriginal and auto-generated content – and even, in some
instances, scraper sites were outranking content originators.
As a result, these sites were making tons of advertising revenue
(remember when I mentioned Google’s self-made AdSense
problem?).
20 YEARS OF SEO: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION