Underneath its simple exterior, the Google search algorithm is a complex beast that calculates rankings and returns results at lightening speeds. It has progressed from humble beginnings to something very sophisticated indeed.

As businesses, we hold our breath with every update and celebrate the success of uplift or pick up the pieces from a penalty. These updates commonly have names, which have become infamous recently – Panda or Penguin anyone?

How well do you know Dewey or Jagger though? Here is an interactive timeline (with a humorous edge) that details the entire catalog of Google search updates since its origin in 1998. Enjoy!

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PageRank (PR) was Google’s original secret weapon, a scale that would rank websites based on incoming links and where those links came from. Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR.

But do you need a high PR to have a successful site? Search rankings are one thing, but what about actual site popularity and traffic?

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In the blue corner… Google! In the red corner… SEO! … aaaaaaand, FIGHT!

Is it just us, or are the results from search engines getting out of control? Often several of the top ten search results will contain websites that seem to have received their position mainly through SEO efforts, not by being truly great resources (at least not great enough to be in the top ten).

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Google’s new Wikipedia-competitor, Knol, has made quite a splash lately. The strange thing is, Google doesn’t own the domain name Knol.com. It belongs to a Dutch company specialized in steam cleaning equipment. (Google’s Knol website is located at knol.google.com.) A burst of traffic to Knol.com The Knol.com website (i.e. the one not owned by Google) [...]

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SEOmoz has selected the Pingdom uptime monitoring service as their Tool of the Week and have given us a very positive review in their blog. They have a lot of nice things to say about Pingdom. The review looks at our alerts, reports and some of our other features as well as the general usefulness [...]

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There are a lot of bloggers out there aiming to make a living from their blogging (or at least supplement their main income a bit). In the blogging world, content is king, but there are other factors as well. One major factor is basic human impatience. If your blog loads slowly, to a lot of [...]

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When your website gets indexed by Google it will be added to Google’s regular crawling. This means that Google will load pages from your site at a regular interval. If your website is popular (high traffic and many inbound links) it will be crawled more often than if it is seen as a less important [...]

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