List of Google SEO Updates in 2014

Google announced that the Pirate Update 2 was rolled out this week. After many criticisms that Google is not doing enough against Piracy it updated its filter to help stem piracy. It works similar like Panda or Penguin.

Google Penguin 3.0 update timeline Friday, October 17: SEOs started to notice changes to their rankings and murmurings started on Twitter Saturday: Twitter blew up with #Penguin3 and #PenguinUpdate tags trending in the SEO community Sunday Morning: There were still thoughts that this was not the Google Penguin 3.0 but Google Panda 4.1 with extra teeth Sunday Afternoon: Confirmation through Barry Schwartz Monday: Some recoveries, some people feeling disappointed general confusion from Google as to the whole process.

Over the weekend it appears that Google has made a rather interesting update to their news cluster results - the little block of news articles that sometimes accompanies a search in regular google searches - on several fronts including the name, the actual websites allowed to appear in the new box and the frequency of the box's appearance.

Google has officially dropped authorship bylines from within the search results. In addition, Google will stop tracking content written by authors as tied by the author's authorship profile. John Mueller of Google said on Google+: I've been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results.

Google has announced that going HTTPS - adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site - will give you a minor ranking boost. Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a "very lightweight signal" within the overall ranking algorithm.

Editor's note: Since the publication of this post, Google has entirely discontinued support for authorship markup in web search. While we're leaving this post up for reference, we want you to know that implementation of authorship of any kind will no longer result in rich author snippets shown on SERPs.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, recently announced at SMX Advanced in Seattle that the third iteration of its Payday loan algorithm would be rolling out sometime this week. Then this evening on Twitter, Matt Cutts confirmed that the update is already in the process of being rolled out: @BtotheMcG it's rolling out now!

Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm. Google's Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google's top search results. But didn't Google stop updating us on Panda refreshes and updates since they are monthly rolling updates?

Google has confirmed they have released a new algorithm update to their Payday Loan Algorithm update over this weekend. This algorithm specifically targets "very spammy queries" and is unrelated to the Panda or Penguin algorithms. A Google spokesperson told us: Over the weekend we began rolling out a new algorithmic update.

We've been noticing a steady and consistent level of chatter in the forums and social networks from webmasters and SEOs around Google's search results fluctuations. The steady an consistent level of chatter is actually higher than the typical, but it is steady and consistently asking if there was shifts.

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced that Google has released a refresh of its Page Layout Algorithm. The filter, also known as the Top Heavy algorithm, downgrades the ranking of a web page with too many ads at the top or if the ads are deemed too distracting for users.