In a lot of ways, 2014 was a landmark year for Google SEO. Hummingbird’s effects finally became tangible as it completed its global rollout. Panda 4.0 and Penguin 3.0 kept the pressure up on spammers, while Google’s human reviewers continued to dish out manual actions to suspicious-looking sites. These, combined with smaller updates, paved the way for the more nuanced and intent-responsive SERPs that we see today. While the search landscape still isn’t perfect, it’s certainly better than what it was years ago. [Read more…]