Being an SEO Specialist, One thing that I always have to be ready for is when Google changes its rules. Based on the 5 years of experience that I have, I have heard Google come up with some of the weirdest names of the algorithms. I am sure that like me you would also have wondered what they meant. Let’s discuss them in detail.
1. Panda
Panda algorithm received its name after Navneet Panda, who is one of the leading engineers of Google and helped create this algorithm. It is quite common for Google to name their updates after important employees
2. Penguin
The reason for naming the algorithm “Penguin” is because of the efforts made by the algorithm to curb the manipulation and spamming of the backlinks by the sites.
3. Hummingbird
Hummingbird was chosen as the name by Google because of its ability to provide accurate and swift search results just like the mannerisms of a hummingbird that swiftly flits from one flower to another while collecting its nectar.
4. Rank Brain
Although the official reason for the term “Rank Brain” is never given, the term probably stems from “rank,” which means that the program ranks the search results, and “brain,” referring to the fact that the program uses artificial intelligence.
5. Fred
The term “Fred” is not officially recognized by Google; it is just a name that has been given to the update within the SEO community. It is used to denote an update which targets low-quality content and poor user experience.
6. Caffeine
The name Google gave this update is “Caffeine,” and this is because they were targeting more freshness and relevancy in their search results, just as how coffee energizes you.
7. Vince
Although the precise motive that has led to the naming of this update “Vince” is not clear, it is referred to unofficially as an indication of the trend towards preference of larger and more authoritative sites.
8. Florida
There wasn’t an official explanation of why Florida was named so from Google, although it is speculated that the name was chosen randomly and had nothing to do with the role of the update.
9. Boston
Just like “Florida,” “Boston” seems to be a name selected for this update because of its place or time (at a conference), not having anything to do with its functionality.
10. Big Daddy
“Big Daddy” would have been chosen as the name to show that there was a significant improvement in the infrastructure of Google’s crawling and indexing of websites.
11. Hilltop
“Hilltop” is not an officially named algorithm but rather a concept of describing the methodology of ranking web pages in relation to authority and relevance. The term “Hilltop” implies a “top” source metaphorically located at the top of a hill.
12. Possum
The designation of this particular update as “Possum” was coined within the SEO community, reflecting its objective of increasing the variety of results for local searches, similar to how possums manage to thrive in different conditions.
13. BERT
Although not disclosed to the public, it is highly possible that the acronym “BERT” stands for “bidirectional encoder representations from transformers,” which improves language comprehension in both directions within a sentence.
14. Mobilegeddon
The phrase “Mobilegeddon” was used to emphasize the importance of making websites mobile-friendly and that failing to do so could spell disaster for the mobile search ranking.
Finally, if you have been curious about the meaning of the name Google.
The name of the company Google is actually derived from the word “Googol”, which refers to a very large number (number one with 100 zeroes following it). They chose to use this name since it represented their intention of providing users with access to a large number of data through their platform.
We at DigiChefs are not just experts in helping our clients manage SEO but we are also very interested in the inner workings of Google and search engines. We hope you have enjoyed this article too.
