Over the year, Google released more than a dozen Panda updates, all aimed at reducing low-quality pages from appearing in the SERPs.In January 2012, Google announced a page layout algorithm change. This aimed at penalizing pages with too many ads, very little value, or both, positioned above the fold. The term "above the fold" refers to the visible portion of a web page when a visitor first lands on it. In other words, whatever you can see without the need to scroll down is above the fold. Some SEOs referred to this page layout algorithm change as the “Top Heavy” update.In February, Google announced another 17 changes to its algorithm, including spell-checking, which is of interest to us.

Later in the same month, Google announced another 40 changes. In March, there were 50 more modifications announced, including one that made changes to anchor text “scoring”.Google certainly wasn’t resting on its laurels. On April 24, the Penguin update was unleashed. This was widely expected, and webmasters assumed it was going to be an over-optimization penalty. Google initially called it a “Webspam Update”, but it was soon named “Penguin”.

This update checked for a wide variety of spam techniques, including keyword stuffing. It also analyzed the anchor text used in external links pointing to websites.In April, yet another set of updates were announced, 52 this time.In May, Google started rolling out “Knowledge Graph”. looking was a huge step towards semantic search (the technology Google uses to better understand the context of search terms). We also saw Penguin 1.1 during this month and another 39 announced changes. One of these new changes included better link scheme detection. Link scheme detection helped identify websites that had built their own links to gain better rankings. In July, Google sent out “unnatural link warnings” via Google Search Console, to any site where it had detected a large number of “unnatural” links. To avoid a penalty, Google gave webmasters the opportunity to remove the "unnatural" links.

Think of unnatural links as any link the webmaster controls, and ones they probably created themselves or asked others to create for them. These would include links on blog networks and other low-quality websites. Inbound links such as these typically used a high percentage of specific keyword phrases in their anchor text. Google wanted webmasters to be responsible for the links that pointed to their sites. Webmasters who had created their own sneaky link campaigns were able to do something about it.

However, if other sites were linking to their pages with poor quality links, then Google expected webmasters to contact the site owners and request removal of the bad link(s).If you have ever tried to contact a webmaster to ask for a link to be removed, you’ll know that it can be an impossible task. For many webmasters, this was an impractical undertaking because the unnatural link warnings were often the result of tens or hundreds of thousands of bad links to a single site.

Google eventually back-tracked and said that these unnatural link warnings may not result in a penalty after all. The word on the street was that Google would be releasing a tool to help webmasters clean up their link profiles.When you think about it, Google's flip-flopping on this policy was understandable and just. After all, if websites were going to get penalized for having too many spammy links pointing to their pages, then that would open the doors of opportunity to criminal types.

Dishonest webmasters looking to take down their competition would simply need to point thousands of low-quality links to their pages using automated link-building software.In July, Google announced a further 86 changes to its algorithm.In August, the search engine giant started to penalize sites that had repeatedly violated copyright, possibly via The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests.For those who might not be familiar with this, the DMCA is a controversial United States digital rights management (DRM) law. It was first enacted on October 28, 1998, by the then-President Bill Clinton.
.