Google Updates, Penalties and Filters – A Walk Down Memory Lane

Google have been pretty busy with updates lately and when there are updates, you can be sure to find penalties and filters being applied.

Over the past few years, Google has had many algorithm updates, data refreshes and toolbar updates… here’s the list I’ve been able to compile from the past few years:

Florida (Algorithm Update November/December 2003)
Austin (January 2004)
Brandy (Algorithm Update February 2004)
Allegra (February 2005)
Bourbon (May 2005)
Jagger (Algorithm Update October – December 2005)
Big Daddy (Infrastructure Update January 2006)
GoogleBomb (Algorithm Update January 2007)
Buffy (June 2007)
Directory Ban (September 2007)
Paid Links Penalty (October 2007 – January 2008)

The most current updates have targeted sites that have been selling links and if caught, your visible Toolbar PageRank will drop (fortunately, this doesn’t have any impact on rankings or traffic). Also some industries (the SEO industry in particular) have noticed some drops in PageRank, not because of link selling, but simply because of the nature of the industry and the types of links SEOs seem to attract.

Because everyone has been talking about the paid link debate, I figured that instead, I’d take a step back in time and look at some of the other penalties and issues that webmasters may have experienced over the years:

1. Google Sandbox
2. Google -30
3. Google Bombing
4. Google Bowling
5. Google Duplicate Content Filter & Multiple Sites
6. Google Supplemental Results
7. Google Domain name Age Filter
8. Google’s Omitted Results Filter
9. Google’s Trust Rank Filter
10. links.htm page filter
11. Reciprocal Link Filter
12. Link Farming Filter
13. CO-citation Linking Filter
14. To many links at once Filter
15. To many Pages at once filter
16. Broken Link Filter
17. Page Load Time Filter
18. Over Optimization Filter
19. Keyword Stuffing Filter
20. Meta Tag Stuffing Filter
21. Automated Google Query Filter
22. IP Class Filter
23. Google Toolbar Filter
24. Google’s Two Word Keyword Filter
25. Country Specific Filters & Weights
26. The Network Filter
27. The Hyphen Filter

It’s important to note that this list is really more of a stroll down SEO memory lane and a lot of the above-mentioned filters and penalties no longer apply (and haven’t for quite some time). But knowing about them helps us further understand the evolution of search.

If you’re new to the search game, then it wouldn’t hurt having a look through the list above and keep an eye on Bill’s patent reviews on SEO By The SEA. It’s a great way of finding-out with what the search engine’s could be up to. Also, thanks to Search Engine Land for the help compiling the above list.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!