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Pigeon: Search Engine Land’s Name For The New Google Local Search Update

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Last night, Google released a pretty significant local search algorithm update. Google told us there was no internal name for the update, but now that we see that it was fairly significant, we decided to give it a name: Pigeon.

Pigeon is the name we decided on because this is a local search update and pigeons tend to fly back home.

When the Google Panda update launched, there was no official name from Google, so we named it the “Farmer” update. A few days later, Google told us they internally named it the Panda update. So we switched names from Farmer to Panda to avoid that confusion.

Since this update was nameless at Google, we named it the Pigeon update so that we have a name to reference in the future.

For more details on this update, see our story from last night.

Image credit to ShutterStock

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.