Google releases upwards of 300 updates a year, but 2010, seemed to keep marketers on their toes more than usual. There were several updates that had dramatic impacts on SEO and paid search marketing. The following is a list of our top 10 Google updates for the year. If you missed any of these, you might be moving a little slower than your competition in 2011.
December 2009–Introduction of real time search results
With this update, Google included live news in search results from sources like Twitter and FriendFeed; this also included the addition of news headlines and blog posts.
February 2010–Searches refined by location
This is the first update of the year that addressed localization. In addition to Google tailoring results based on a searcher’s query location, users could select specific cities for additional local refinement capabilities.
March 2010–Addition of public data into SERPs and microdata inclusion
Google started displaying microdata in results if rich snippets were used on a webpage. Using specifications in HTML5, this update enabled marketers to include information—like reviews and profiles—on their websites, so Google could use it when rendering SERPs.
April 2010–Announcement that site speed impacts rankings
Google noted that speed does not trump relevancy in its ranking algorithm, but this announcement showed how much it emphasizes sites that are built to render quickly.
May 2010–Long tail algorithm change aka “Mayday update”
Google explained this update as “an algorithmic change…looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries.” With this change, pages that were keyword-optimized or matched to specific long tail keyword searches generally lost rankings if pages are not deemed “high quality.”
May 2010–Approval of the reasonable surfer patent
In May, Google was granted a patent that “stated that all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight” (Search Engine Land). This event reinforced the value of high quality links that indicate the value of a page to Google’s algorithm. It also verified suspicions that link placement was an algorithmic factor and that contextually-irrelevant links are devalued.
June 2010–Caffeine update
Google Caffeine was a new indexing system that provided faster results, so newly published content appeared sooner in SERPs. With this change, Google signaled that they had significant changes planned, which came to fruition with Google Instant and Places (Google).
September 2010–Google Instant
Google Instant added a predictive element to Google’s search results and displayed approximately 7 or 8 results pages per query. The-search-as-you-go update made waves as it simultaneously multiplied the amount of results per query and guided searchers to content based on predictive analysis.
October 2010–Google Places
Google Places integrated “Places listings” with organic listings and moved the traditional Google Local map to the right column of search results. This meant that there was even less SEO real estate to work with as Places results displaced organic listings (Search Engine Land).
October 2010–Google Boost
Showing a preference for local listings, the Google Boost update allowed businesses to pay for an advantage in Google Places listings. Boost afforded marketers the chance to pay for emphasized local listings that display below traditional paid search results. This allowed additional opportunities for marketers to buy rankings and potentially force other relevant results down the page, requiring SEOs to pay more attention to optimizing for localized search results and optimizing the keywords that do not serve local search results.