1. Jan 17 2013 – Link Devaluation
Many webmaster saw chunks of their ranking pages fall of the SERPS due to a continuous link devaluation process implemented by Google. It was like a New Year resolution to weed the lawn.
2. Jan 22 2013 – Panda 24
This was the first officially announced update of the year. It affected 1.2% of all search queries. It was different from the link evaluation update of the 17th, Which Google didn’t on up.
3. Mar 14 2013 – Panda 25
Matt Cutts suggested at SMX west that #25 would be the last update to panda before it was incorporated into their indexing processes. Though Google didn’t confirm the exact date, we got it from MozCast.
4. May 22 2013 – Penguin 2.0
Penguin 2.0 arrived a year and a month after its first version tumbled out. Effects ranged from negligible (on the already affected) to finely targeted. Penguin 2.0 was preceded in the days leading up to it by much hype and speculation.
5. Jun 11 2013 – Payday Loan Update
On June 11, Google announced its intent to clean up the spammy payday loans SERPs and their porn cousins. Matt cuts suggested it would roll out over a month or two. At SMX advance, he also explained that it would go after many illegal link schemes.
6. Jun 11 2013 – Panda Dance
Panda was now a rollout update that slowly integrated into the algorithm over a period of 10 days. This was more of a dance as opposed to the expected everflux. Matt Cutts made this clarification SMX Advanced.
7. Jul 18 2013 – Panda Recovery
We saw a softening of the effects of some of panda earlier penalties, leading to suspicions that this was not the usual by now 10-day rolling update. Google did confirm this update.
8. Jul 19 2013 – Knowledge Graph Expansion
Knowledge Graph display Google SERPs saw a more than 50 percent increase seemingly overnight. More than a quarter of all searches started showing some kind of Bio.
9. Aug 6 2013 – In-depth Articles
We started seeing a new type of results for queries that demanded better detailed answers. 3 pieces of evergreen, long-form content became a feature across search results for information-seeking queries.
10. Aug 20 2013 – Hummingbird
Though announced only on September 26th the Hummingbird update was a game-changing transformation of Google‘s algorithm. Hummingbird focusing on conversational and semantic search to try and deliver correct answers to board meaning questions.
11. Oct 4 2013 – Penguin 2.1
Penguin was revived after a four month hibernation. There were even a few recoveries reported. Forums, Directories, Blogrolls, and others were affected. The impact was as varied as that of 2.0.
