Google: Pirate Update

Google’s Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings. The filter is periodically updated. When this happens, sites previously impacted may escape, if they’ve made the right improvements. The filter may also catch new sites that escaped being caught before, plus it may release “false positives” that were caught.

Google: Payday Update

Launched on June 11, 2013 – the “Payday Update” was a new algorithm targeted at cleaning up search results for traditionally “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries.

Google is now rolling out the 3rd version of the PayDay Loan algorithm.

Last night we reported that Google is going to be launching PayDay Loan 3.0 and Google’s Matt Cutts posted on Twitter moments ago that it is now rolling out.

Cutts, Google’s head of search quality said, “it’s rolling out now!”

To catch you up, PayDay Loan 2.0 launched a few weeks ago around May 17th and 18th. That specifically targeted very spammy sites in the porn, pills and casino markets.

Payday 3.0 specifically targets spammy queries, versus spammy sites. What exactly that means is not 100% clear. But the types of queries this targets includes terms like [payday loans], [casinos], [viagra] and other forms of highly spammy queries.

Google: Pigeon Update

What Is The Google Pigeon Update?

Launched on July 24, 2014 for U.S. English results, the “Pigeon Update” is a new algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

Google: Penguin Update

What Is The Google Penguin Update?

Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught by mistake, may escape.