An Insight Into Google's Florida

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Recently, Google undertook a major update in its search algorithms. On November 16th, 2003, Google rolled out the popularly known "Florida Update." This week on SEO Chat, we'll be taking a close look at the "Florida Update," and what it can mean to you and your business. In this first article, Nakul goes over some of the features of this new update. "The 'Florida' update has been said to have a vast similarity to a sea storm for ecommerce business because most of them were dislocated in the search listings resulting in loosing targeted traffic and ultimately loosing business."

As we all know, Google™ undertook a major update in its search algorithms which started on the 16th day of November 2003 popularly known as the ‘Florida Update’, an exclusive ‘Google Dance’. The name "Google Dance" has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Although Google performs Google dance (reindexes the whole web) almost every month, this one is so far being referred as an update to their algorithm, which delivered drastic changes to the Search Engine Results Pages. These dramatic changes in the search results at Google churned the Black Boxes all over as millions of websites that were at the top or near the top positions in the search results for specific keywords came tumbling down hundreds of positions and some were simply made to disappear from the results. The “Florida” update has been said to have a vast similarity to a sea storm for ecommerce business because most of them were dislocated in the search listings resulting in loosing targeted traffic and ultimately loosing business. Many people expressed grudge and rage against this update. 

Why Did Google Have the Florida Update?

Google’s main aim is to deliver the most relevant and quality results to users. As said by Larry Page, co-founder and president of Products, Google, "The perfect search engine... would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." (From the corporate section of the Google website http://www.google.com/corporate/today.html). For the last eight months ,it has been easy to spam Google by using keywords in the anchor text of external links. Such linking manipulated Page Rank and spam results were showing up on the first page for very competitive searches. Then, PageRank was recomputed for the entire web which acted as a sword against spam tricks.  However, because of many ecommerce business owners' continued practice of link spam, the Florida update was planned by Google. The main implementations of this update can be understood in terms of features of this update move.

Next: Florida Update Features >>
 

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