On the 23rd of February, Google made some big changes to the SERPs, removing the right-hand column of adverts and placing a block of 4 adverts at the top of the SERPs. For any given search term, organic results were now pushed down the page. Above the fold, most searchers only saw the paid advertising links.On May 12th, Google rolled out a second mobile-friendly update that essentially reinforced the first and made mobile sites perform better on mobile search platforms.

In May the same year, Payday Loan 2.0 was released. This was an update to the original Payday Loan algorithm and was thought to have extended the reach of this algorithm to international queries.Also in May, Panda was updated. It was called Panda 4.0.

In 2013, Google updated both Panda and Penguin several times. These updates refined the two different technologies to try to increase the quality of pages ranking in the SERPs. On July 18, a Panda update was thought to have been released to “soften” the effects of a previously released Panda, so Google obviously watched the effects of its updates, and modified them accordingly.