In February 2014, Google updated its page layout update.
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. This changed the nature of organic SEO forever.
Changes in 2015
The Mobile-friendly Update
On April 21, Google began rolling out an update that was designed to boost mobile-friendly web pages in the mobile search results.
To help webmasters prepare for the update, Google provided a web page where webmasters could test their site to see if it was mobile-friendly or not. You can find the mobile-friendly testing tool here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
To use this tool, you simply enter your web page URL and wait for the results. Hopefully, you will see something like this:
The mobile-friendly update:
1. Only affects searches carried out on mobile devices.
2. Applies to individual pages, not entire websites.
3. Affects ALL languages globally.
This update makes a lot of sense. If someone is searching on a small screen, Google only wants to show web pages that will display properly on such devices. And therefore it is important to perform functional keyword discovery when performing effective SEO.
