Each year Google changes its search algorithm up to 500 to 600 times. While most of these changes are minor, every few months Google rolls out a "major" algorithmic update that affect search results in significant ways. Here are Google's algorithm changes from the first algorithm up-to January 2012 ,
Google Launching - March 1998
The first search engine using link metrics for ranking was launched.
Google Toolbar - December 2000
Google launches their browser tool bar - toolbar page rank (TBPR). This is the time when the argumentation about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) began.
1st Documented Update - September 2002
The first documented Google update. Changes although unclear, were more than just the casual PageRank update.
The Boston Update - February 2003
First announced at SES Boston, it is the first named Google update. The first few updates were algorithm combinations and were aimed at the monthly index refresh (the so called Google Dance).
The Cassandra Update - April 2003
It concerned some basic link quality issues and was hostile to hidden links and hidden text.
The Dominic Update - May 2003
Google changed the way back links are reported and counted. Many webmasters note bounces after the bots "Deepcrawler" and "Freshbot" were released.
The Esmerelda Update - June 2003
"Google Dance" was replaced with "Everflux", this was indicator for the upcoming changes in Google. It was the last of the regular monthly updates.
The Fritz Update - July 2003
Google index is now changing daily instead of monthly. Fritz caused the end of monthly "Google Dance".
The Supplemental Index - September 2003
This allowed Google to index more documents without any changes in the performance level.
The Florida Update - November 2003
Putting end SEO to technics used in the late 90s as keyword stuffing. A lot of sites lost rankings. The SEO became more challenging.
The Austin Update - January 2004
This update came as enhancement to the previous Florida, as it continued to oppose the On-Page tactics as keyword stuffing and invisible text. There were some speculations about Google updating their algorithm so it takes seriously page relevance.
The Brandy Update - February 2004
A great variety of changes. The LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) enhanced Google ability to figure out synonyms and completely changed the keyword analysis.
The Nofollow - January 2005
Google with cooperation with Microsoft and Yahoo introduced the "nofollow" link attribute. Its main purpose is to help with the cleaning of the spam but it had great impact on the links.
The Allegra Update - February 2005
There were changes in the rankings but the overall changes of this update remained unclear. There were speculations about Google penalizing the suspicious links.
The Bourbon Update - May 2005
As the guys from Google announced it is "something like 3.5 changes in search quality". Webmasters weren't sure what exactly the innovations are but the speculation was the "Bourbon" changed the way how non-canonical and duplicate content were treated (the battle between www and non-www).
Personalized Search - June 2005
Google began using the history of the user searches for the user searches for the automatic adjustment of the results. The effect was small at first, but Google continue to use search history for many applications.
The XML Sitemaps - June 2005
The traditional HTML sitemaps were changed with XML sitemaps. This allowed webmasters to submit XML sitemaps via Webmaster Tools and gave SEOs the opportunity to influence over indexation and crawling.
The Gilligan Update - September 2005
Google claimed there were no major changes in this update. Index data is being updated daily but some metrics as Toolbar PR once every 3 months.
The Google Local/Maps Update - October 2005
It was a move that drove to several changes in local SEO. Google Maps data was merged into the LBC to encourage businesses to update their site information.
The Jagger Update - October 2005
This update began roughly September and stretched to October, when it had the peak of its impact. The targets of this update were link farms, paid links, low-quality links and reciprocal links.
The Big Daddy Update - December 2005
An update in the basis of Google that concerns the way it handles redirects 301/302, canonicalization and technical issues.
The Supplemental Update - November 2006
Changes in the way that filtered pages were treated. Although it felt a bit like penalty, Google claimed there are no such things.
The False Alarm - December 2006
Despite the reports for great changes in the rankings, the Google guys said there are no major modifications.
The Universal Search Update - May 2007
Not a typical algorithm update, but Google managed to integrate news, pictures, videos, and many other features, changing greatly their format.
The Buffy Update - June 2007
Judging by what Matt Cutts said - the update is just accumulation of small changes.
The Dewey Update - April 2008
Although it appeared as there is great shuffle at the end of March and beginning of April the changes brought by this update were unclear. The speculations were that Google enhances its own properties (including Google Books).
The Google Suggest Update - August 2008
The introduction of the drop down suggestions below the search box, appearing while users are typing their queries.
The Vince Update - February 2009
As it was reported by SEOs, it looked like the update favors strongly the big brands, despite the fact Matt Cutts announced that Vince brings some "minor changes".
The Rel-Canonical Tag Update - February 2009
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo announced their support for the Canonical Tag. This gave opportunity for the webmasters to send canonicalization signals to search bots without having any impact on human visitors.
The Caffeine Update Review - August 2009
Google released preview of a massive infrastructure change. The innovations were: increased speed of crawling, expanded index, and last but not least integration of indexation and ranking almost in real-time.
The Real-Time Search Update - December 2009
The real time search was a fact: Google News, Twitter feeds, freshly indexed content and other different sources. All were integrated into real-time feed for some of the SERPs. In the same time sources keep on expanding (Social media as well).
The Google Places Update - April 2010
"Places" was firstly presented as a part of Google Maps in 2009. With its official launch in April 2010, the update brought new local search results and gave the opportunity of new local advertisement options.
The May Day Update - May 2010
Released at the end of April and early May, the effect was great drops in the long-tail traffic. Later it was confirmed that the algorithm impacts on the long-tails.
The Caffeine (Roll Out) Update - June 2010
Finally Google finished integrating the Caffeine infrastructure. The update boosted the raw speed of Google, and in a way fixed indexation and crawling (according to Google the results were up-to 50% fresher index).
The Brand Update - August 2010
It does not refer to the usual algorithm updates as Google allowed multiple results for one domain on a SERP (having in mind that before that domains were restricted to only 1-2 listings).
Google Instant - September 2010
Google instant was an expansion of Google Suggest, showing search results while the user was still typing. The impact on SEO was fairly small.
Instant Reviews - November 2010
In November, an icon with a magnifying glass appeared on the search results in Google and allowed visitors to preview a landing page without visiting it. This showed that Google renewed their focus on landing page design, usability and quality.
Social Signals - December 2010
Bing amd Google both confirmed they were taking into consideration social signals to help determine ranking. This new development uses data from Facebook and Twitter.
Negative Reviews - December 2010
After the New York Times published a material on the e-commerce site DecorMyEyes and its rankings that were based on negative reviews, Google made some changes to the algorithm in order to target websites using similar tricks.
Overstock.com Penalty - January 2011
In January, Overstock was penalized publicly by Google for using shady SEO tactics to boost their rankings. Similarly, JCPenny was also hit with such a penalty in February.
Attribution Update - January 28, 2011
This update was response to many so called "high-profile" spam cases and was meant to stop scrapers. This update had an impact on about 2% of the searches.
Panda Farmer 23, 2011
This was one of the big updates that affected 12% of all search results. The update is intended to deal with a lot of site quality issues such as content farms, thin content and others. The update came to Europe in April the same year.
The +1 Button - March 30, 2011
In the end of March, Google placed a +1 button next to the results links responding to the competition (Facebook and Twitter). By clicking the +1 button, users are able to influence both organic and paid search results with in their social circle.
Panda 2.0 - April 11, 2011
The Panda update affected all English queries around the world. Some new factors started to be taken into consideration such as data about websites that were blocked by users via the Chrome browser or the SERPs.
Panda 2.1 - May 9, 2011
Another set of changes were made to the Panda update but they were not discussed thoroughly by Google and didn't seem to be very significant.
Schema.org - June 2, 2011
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! joined efforts in order to make the job of the webmasters easier by providing a collection of schemas (in other words html tags). Some new "schemas" were also created in order o achieve richer and better search results.
Panda 2.2 - June 21, 2011
Panda was updated once again but this time the updates were done not in real time and were done separately from the main index.
Google + - June 28, 2011
Google launched their own social media that poses a serious threat to Facebook. They implemented their network in various Google products like Gmail and others. In just two weeks, 10 million users signed up for Google +.
Panda 2.3 - July 23, 2011
According to some webmasters, Google made another update to Panda but it was very unclear whether there were any actual changes made or just the existing ranking and data factors were updated.
Panda 2.4 - August 12, 2011
In August, Panda was released internationally except from Korean, Japanese and Chinese queries. It was reported that this had effect on about 6-9% of queries in the countries that were affected.
Expanded Sitelinks - August 16, 2011
The expanded site-links was rolled out mostly for brand queries after Google experimented for a while. Soon, the original 12-packs were linked to only 6.
Pagination Elements - September 15, 2011
In order to deal with the duplication and crawl problems causes by pagination, Google introduced two link attributes - rel="prev" and rel="next". The automatic canonicalization and consolidation for "View All" pages were also improved.
516 Updates - September 21, 2011
The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, stated that 516 updates were made in 2010. This is not an update but its a bit surprising, especially knowing that they tested more than 13,000 updates.
Panda 2.5 - September 28, 2011
There were a new Panda update in September, but it wasn't very clear what the changes are. However, some sites reported huge losses.
Panda "FLUX" - October 5, 2011
Matt Cutts tweeted that some "Panda-related Flux" should be expected and the figure he gave was "-2%".
Query Encryption - October 18, 2011
Google announced that search queries will be encrypted for privacy reasons which had a negative impact on the organic keyword referral data.
Freshness Update - November 3, 2011
In November, Google announced a new algorithm change that was going to reward freshness and would impact 25% of the queries. The update was focused mainly on recent content.
10 Pack of Updates - November 14, 2011
In an attempt to little more transparent, Matt Cutts posted a list with 10 recent updates. Most of them were some small changes and the timeline was unclear.
Panda 3.1 - November 18, 2011
After the Panda 2.5 update, came the time of the "Panda Flux" period where more updates were made but the changes were minor. There were no official 3.0 update but some analysis called this one the 3.1
December 10-Pack - December 1, 2011
A second pack of 10 updates was announced in December. Some of these updates included detection of parked domains, blog and image search freshness and more. The exacts dates of the updates were unclear.
January 30-Pack - January 5, 2012
30 changes were announced by Google over the past month. Some of the changes included more rich snippets, relevant site-links and other improvements.
Search + Your World - January 10, 2012
A huge change in terms of personalization was announced by Google. They are incorporating users profiles and a lot of social data into the SERPs. There is also a button that will help you turn off personalization if you don't need it.
Ads Above the Fold - January 19, 2012
The page layout is now even more improvement as the new update devalues websites with too many ads on top or "above the fold". There were speculations that the Panda update was doing a similar thing. This update has no official name yet.
Source:
http://www.floridatechnologyjournal.com/features/42-rokstories/1061-history-of-google-algorithm-changes-infographic
Google Launching - March 1998
The first search engine using link metrics for ranking was launched.
Google Toolbar - December 2000
Google launches their browser tool bar - toolbar page rank (TBPR). This is the time when the argumentation about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) began.
1st Documented Update - September 2002
The first documented Google update. Changes although unclear, were more than just the casual PageRank update.
The Boston Update - February 2003
First announced at SES Boston, it is the first named Google update. The first few updates were algorithm combinations and were aimed at the monthly index refresh (the so called Google Dance).
The Cassandra Update - April 2003
It concerned some basic link quality issues and was hostile to hidden links and hidden text.
The Dominic Update - May 2003
Google changed the way back links are reported and counted. Many webmasters note bounces after the bots "Deepcrawler" and "Freshbot" were released.
The Esmerelda Update - June 2003
"Google Dance" was replaced with "Everflux", this was indicator for the upcoming changes in Google. It was the last of the regular monthly updates.
The Fritz Update - July 2003
Google index is now changing daily instead of monthly. Fritz caused the end of monthly "Google Dance".
The Supplemental Index - September 2003
This allowed Google to index more documents without any changes in the performance level.
The Florida Update - November 2003
Putting end SEO to technics used in the late 90s as keyword stuffing. A lot of sites lost rankings. The SEO became more challenging.
The Austin Update - January 2004
This update came as enhancement to the previous Florida, as it continued to oppose the On-Page tactics as keyword stuffing and invisible text. There were some speculations about Google updating their algorithm so it takes seriously page relevance.
The Brandy Update - February 2004
A great variety of changes. The LSI(Latent Semantic Indexing) enhanced Google ability to figure out synonyms and completely changed the keyword analysis.
The Nofollow - January 2005
Google with cooperation with Microsoft and Yahoo introduced the "nofollow" link attribute. Its main purpose is to help with the cleaning of the spam but it had great impact on the links.
The Allegra Update - February 2005
There were changes in the rankings but the overall changes of this update remained unclear. There were speculations about Google penalizing the suspicious links.
The Bourbon Update - May 2005
As the guys from Google announced it is "something like 3.5 changes in search quality". Webmasters weren't sure what exactly the innovations are but the speculation was the "Bourbon" changed the way how non-canonical and duplicate content were treated (the battle between www and non-www).
Personalized Search - June 2005
Google began using the history of the user searches for the user searches for the automatic adjustment of the results. The effect was small at first, but Google continue to use search history for many applications.
The XML Sitemaps - June 2005
The traditional HTML sitemaps were changed with XML sitemaps. This allowed webmasters to submit XML sitemaps via Webmaster Tools and gave SEOs the opportunity to influence over indexation and crawling.
The Gilligan Update - September 2005
Google claimed there were no major changes in this update. Index data is being updated daily but some metrics as Toolbar PR once every 3 months.
The Google Local/Maps Update - October 2005
It was a move that drove to several changes in local SEO. Google Maps data was merged into the LBC to encourage businesses to update their site information.
The Jagger Update - October 2005
This update began roughly September and stretched to October, when it had the peak of its impact. The targets of this update were link farms, paid links, low-quality links and reciprocal links.
The Big Daddy Update - December 2005
An update in the basis of Google that concerns the way it handles redirects 301/302, canonicalization and technical issues.
The Supplemental Update - November 2006
Changes in the way that filtered pages were treated. Although it felt a bit like penalty, Google claimed there are no such things.
The False Alarm - December 2006
Despite the reports for great changes in the rankings, the Google guys said there are no major modifications.
The Universal Search Update - May 2007
Not a typical algorithm update, but Google managed to integrate news, pictures, videos, and many other features, changing greatly their format.
The Buffy Update - June 2007
Judging by what Matt Cutts said - the update is just accumulation of small changes.
The Dewey Update - April 2008
Although it appeared as there is great shuffle at the end of March and beginning of April the changes brought by this update were unclear. The speculations were that Google enhances its own properties (including Google Books).
The Google Suggest Update - August 2008
The introduction of the drop down suggestions below the search box, appearing while users are typing their queries.
The Vince Update - February 2009
As it was reported by SEOs, it looked like the update favors strongly the big brands, despite the fact Matt Cutts announced that Vince brings some "minor changes".
The Rel-Canonical Tag Update - February 2009
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo announced their support for the Canonical Tag. This gave opportunity for the webmasters to send canonicalization signals to search bots without having any impact on human visitors.
The Caffeine Update Review - August 2009
Google released preview of a massive infrastructure change. The innovations were: increased speed of crawling, expanded index, and last but not least integration of indexation and ranking almost in real-time.
The Real-Time Search Update - December 2009
The real time search was a fact: Google News, Twitter feeds, freshly indexed content and other different sources. All were integrated into real-time feed for some of the SERPs. In the same time sources keep on expanding (Social media as well).
The Google Places Update - April 2010
"Places" was firstly presented as a part of Google Maps in 2009. With its official launch in April 2010, the update brought new local search results and gave the opportunity of new local advertisement options.
The May Day Update - May 2010
Released at the end of April and early May, the effect was great drops in the long-tail traffic. Later it was confirmed that the algorithm impacts on the long-tails.
The Caffeine (Roll Out) Update - June 2010
Finally Google finished integrating the Caffeine infrastructure. The update boosted the raw speed of Google, and in a way fixed indexation and crawling (according to Google the results were up-to 50% fresher index).
The Brand Update - August 2010
It does not refer to the usual algorithm updates as Google allowed multiple results for one domain on a SERP (having in mind that before that domains were restricted to only 1-2 listings).
Google Instant - September 2010
Google instant was an expansion of Google Suggest, showing search results while the user was still typing. The impact on SEO was fairly small.
Instant Reviews - November 2010
In November, an icon with a magnifying glass appeared on the search results in Google and allowed visitors to preview a landing page without visiting it. This showed that Google renewed their focus on landing page design, usability and quality.
Social Signals - December 2010
Bing amd Google both confirmed they were taking into consideration social signals to help determine ranking. This new development uses data from Facebook and Twitter.
Negative Reviews - December 2010
After the New York Times published a material on the e-commerce site DecorMyEyes and its rankings that were based on negative reviews, Google made some changes to the algorithm in order to target websites using similar tricks.
Overstock.com Penalty - January 2011
In January, Overstock was penalized publicly by Google for using shady SEO tactics to boost their rankings. Similarly, JCPenny was also hit with such a penalty in February.
Attribution Update - January 28, 2011
This update was response to many so called "high-profile" spam cases and was meant to stop scrapers. This update had an impact on about 2% of the searches.
Panda Farmer 23, 2011
This was one of the big updates that affected 12% of all search results. The update is intended to deal with a lot of site quality issues such as content farms, thin content and others. The update came to Europe in April the same year.
The +1 Button - March 30, 2011
In the end of March, Google placed a +1 button next to the results links responding to the competition (Facebook and Twitter). By clicking the +1 button, users are able to influence both organic and paid search results with in their social circle.
Panda 2.0 - April 11, 2011
The Panda update affected all English queries around the world. Some new factors started to be taken into consideration such as data about websites that were blocked by users via the Chrome browser or the SERPs.
Panda 2.1 - May 9, 2011
Another set of changes were made to the Panda update but they were not discussed thoroughly by Google and didn't seem to be very significant.
Schema.org - June 2, 2011
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! joined efforts in order to make the job of the webmasters easier by providing a collection of schemas (in other words html tags). Some new "schemas" were also created in order o achieve richer and better search results.
Panda 2.2 - June 21, 2011
Panda was updated once again but this time the updates were done not in real time and were done separately from the main index.
Google + - June 28, 2011
Google launched their own social media that poses a serious threat to Facebook. They implemented their network in various Google products like Gmail and others. In just two weeks, 10 million users signed up for Google +.
Panda 2.3 - July 23, 2011
According to some webmasters, Google made another update to Panda but it was very unclear whether there were any actual changes made or just the existing ranking and data factors were updated.
Panda 2.4 - August 12, 2011
In August, Panda was released internationally except from Korean, Japanese and Chinese queries. It was reported that this had effect on about 6-9% of queries in the countries that were affected.
Expanded Sitelinks - August 16, 2011
The expanded site-links was rolled out mostly for brand queries after Google experimented for a while. Soon, the original 12-packs were linked to only 6.
Pagination Elements - September 15, 2011
In order to deal with the duplication and crawl problems causes by pagination, Google introduced two link attributes - rel="prev" and rel="next". The automatic canonicalization and consolidation for "View All" pages were also improved.
516 Updates - September 21, 2011
The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, stated that 516 updates were made in 2010. This is not an update but its a bit surprising, especially knowing that they tested more than 13,000 updates.
Panda 2.5 - September 28, 2011
There were a new Panda update in September, but it wasn't very clear what the changes are. However, some sites reported huge losses.
Panda "FLUX" - October 5, 2011
Matt Cutts tweeted that some "Panda-related Flux" should be expected and the figure he gave was "-2%".
Query Encryption - October 18, 2011
Google announced that search queries will be encrypted for privacy reasons which had a negative impact on the organic keyword referral data.
Freshness Update - November 3, 2011
In November, Google announced a new algorithm change that was going to reward freshness and would impact 25% of the queries. The update was focused mainly on recent content.
10 Pack of Updates - November 14, 2011
In an attempt to little more transparent, Matt Cutts posted a list with 10 recent updates. Most of them were some small changes and the timeline was unclear.
Panda 3.1 - November 18, 2011
After the Panda 2.5 update, came the time of the "Panda Flux" period where more updates were made but the changes were minor. There were no official 3.0 update but some analysis called this one the 3.1
December 10-Pack - December 1, 2011
A second pack of 10 updates was announced in December. Some of these updates included detection of parked domains, blog and image search freshness and more. The exacts dates of the updates were unclear.
January 30-Pack - January 5, 2012
30 changes were announced by Google over the past month. Some of the changes included more rich snippets, relevant site-links and other improvements.
Search + Your World - January 10, 2012
A huge change in terms of personalization was announced by Google. They are incorporating users profiles and a lot of social data into the SERPs. There is also a button that will help you turn off personalization if you don't need it.
Ads Above the Fold - January 19, 2012
The page layout is now even more improvement as the new update devalues websites with too many ads on top or "above the fold". There were speculations that the Panda update was doing a similar thing. This update has no official name yet.
Source:
http://www.floridatechnologyjournal.com/features/42-rokstories/1061-history-of-google-algorithm-changes-infographic
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