Of all the nuisances in digital marketing, little annoys marketers and webmasters more than algorithm updates. This is accepted common knowledge. What most people don’t know is that although Google makes hyper-frequent updates to their algorithm (claiming to do “several thousand” a year), most are too tiny for the common web-surfer to notice. Every so often however, Google releases an update that is so profound that it completely alters not only marketing strategy, but search engine optimization in itself.

In an effort to make these algorithm changes more digestible, we’ve broken down and explained the most important and impactful updates that Google has made in recent years. In addition to giving the reasoning behind each algorithm update, the District Maven team also provided the major and minor changes we had to make to our own strategy in order to successfully adjust.