SEO is an ever-changing industry and 2014 was no exception. Some of the biggest SEO happenings went down in 2014, so let’s review!

Google’s Big Algorithm Updates

Both of Google’s big algorithms, Panda and Penguin, got major updates in 2014 and both are moving to rolling updates. This means that in the future, there will be no release date for the algorithms, instead they will constantly roll out.

• Panda 4: In May of 2014, Google updated the Panda algorithm. This was the fourth major update to the content focused algorithm. Google also announced that the data refreshing would be on-going and there wouldn’t be huge announcements for every update.

• Penguin 3: After more than a year of no updates, Google finally updated the link based Penguin algorithm in October. This update was a long time coming and very much needed for webmasters that had done lots of hard work cleaning up their backlinks.

• Authorship Photos Drop: The long and heavily pushed Google Authorship was dropped from the SERPS this year. If you have it set up, there’s no need to remove it, Google said they just won’t use it anymore.

• Payday Loan: Two versions of this update were released in the summer to combat this spammy niche.

Search Market Share Changes

• Firefox drops Google for Yahoo: It was big news when Firefox opted to make Yahoo! the default search engine for the next few years. This change immediately took a decent size chunk out of Google’s market share. Yahoo! now has about 30% of the search engine market. **Don’t forget that Yahoo! uses Bing’s data for it’s search results.

• Facebook drops Bing: The social network giant dropped Bing from within their search results. Previously Facebook would allow you to search on the web (using Bing) as well as within Facebook.  Facebook recently released the ability to search from your past posts sparking rumors they may be going after some of Google’s search share in the future.

• Yahoo! Directory closes: The long time staple directory for SEOs closed up shop this year.

Guest Blogging Sorta Died

Matt Cutts’ declared guest blogging (for SEO) dead earlier this year, which was one of the bigger stories in the industry. Whether you are against it or not, if it is spoken by Cutts it becomes Google law. We crafted a post of some ideas you can do instead.

Link Networks Busted Worldwide

Even in Matt Cutts’ absence, his webspam team works very hard to combat spam and link networks, busting link networks across the globe.

We’ve consolidated the SEO year in review in an action-packed video here. How did all these SEO changes affect your business in 2014? Was it positive or negative? Share in the comments.

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