Google 2013 SEO…A Year in Review so you can plan for 2014

As I look back on 2013 and into 2014, it got me thinking: Has Google learned anything New? Have we learned anything?

 This year I’m going to center my attention on evaluating whether Google has progressed and what might be coming ahead based on the highly turbulent past 12 months.

I’m going to take you on a little time-traveling journey. To begin, we’re going to look at some of the big issues we faced in 2013 and will study each of the months patterns since then. We will then identify what Google contributed to the SEO community. We’ll complete by what is likely to come this year and why.

2012

As it turns out it was not the end of the world as some predicted, but for a few site owners it might seem as it was. In 2012 it was a year of catastrophic change byGoogle’s algorithms.

Following were the algorithmic highlights that were seen:

• Panda:  inferior quality content and thin websites were targeted by a total of 15 Panda updates over the year
• Penguin:over-optimization was targeted by the  updates of penguin series. 3 iterations were found out over the year.
• Above the Fold: Google made adjustments in their algorithms to target websites that are  heavy on ads above the crease on landing pages.
• Knowledge Graph: Indicates that box to the right of the search engine result pages containing fragments of information appeared.
• Exact Match Domains: Google restricted valuing exact match of domains.

 Few Non-algorithmic highlights include:

• Link Warnings: This was the year that marked unnatural link  warnings with literally hundreds of thousands propel out to webmasters in a barely  few weeks.
• Project Glass:  This allows users to pretend to pay attention to someone while playing Candy Crush.
• Motorola: Acquisition of Motorola by Google.
• Negative SEO: is back with a retaliation. With so many penalties that are targeting unnatural links and schemes of  webmasters finding competitors using these methodologies against them.
• Disavow: Google has also announced disavow capabilities that indicates which links to your website are  not be counted.

All this set the way to 2013. While 2012 was a disordered year and webmasters faced serious problems due to Google

Let’s see the journey  month-by-month through 2013 and revisit some of the biggest events of this year.  All this helps us know what happened in the past so we can line ourselves up to comprehend what’s likely coming.

Inventions of Google  in 2013

January

• The 24th Panda refresh.

February

• Started first active real world for users of Google Glass.

March

• 25th Panda refreshes.
• Google reprimand SAPE Link Network.

April

• Google gives us break to breath

May

• Phantom Update: Another major  announcement nothing of traffic and ranking changes were found.
• Penguin 2.0 was launched.

June

• An update was found  in the payday loan space..
• Panda Dance: a multi week update came out after the news of Panda that updates would span about 10 days.

July

• Google is found to pull back a little on some of the updates of Panda.

August

• Hummingbird update: This was registered as the largest algorithmic shift in last 12 years and  focus was on accepting conversational search.

September

• Last keyword data available is removed by Google in analytics.  Now it appears like “(not provided)” in Google Analytics.

October

• Penguin 2.1 was updated.

November & December

• Google gives website owners an official pardon for the holidays. Don’t get too calm, though. In 2012 there was another  update on December 21st where they’re held to work until after the New Year.