Google likes to keep us SEOs and digital marketing professionals on our toes and they did a really good job in 2014. Here is a short summary of the SEO changes Google rolled out this year.
Pigeon and Penguin
In July, Google introduced the new Pigeon algorithm: a local search device that takes location services into account when making searches. For local businesses and sites, this development is hugely important to getting traffic that you want from the places that you want them to come from. This algorithm is largely useful to smaller businesses working on a small scale, but can cause some trouble for local businesses that work on a national or global scale. To summarize Pigeon:
- Uses information from local signals to give more accurate searches
- There’s been a reduction in 7-packs, and an increase in 3 packs
- Local businesses are featured more prominently than chains in the local area
Penguin also recently had an update in October, but it was geared more towards handling data than actually changing the algorithm. The refresh allowed sites that had been cleaning up their links to see a surge in rankings, while sites that continued to use spammy links continued to plummet.
