Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)

Florida Update.

It's unlikely to have escaped your notice that Google has recently been through a period of turmoil. Sites that were firmly established in its listings suddenly disappeared like Lord Lucan on Shergar.

Not surprisingly, the search engine management world was thrown into confusion, and the newsgroups reached white heat. One particular news thread became so large that it passed into the general domain and, like a hurricane, earned itself a name. If you've heard of the Florida update, you'll no doubt be as confused as the rest of the industry. If you're blissfully unaware of Florida it would make sense to continue that way if it wasn't such an important issue in marketing an Internet site.

It all started some 18 months ago with a bit of fun called Googlebombing. Google had been trying to influence the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) away from purely site content and draw relevancy from how sites are linked and interlinked with other sites. Effectively, if someone links to your site, they're voting for its quality. Googlebombing exploited a flaw in the new Google algorithm. Instead of making it more difficult for spammers to get high listings, it made it easier. All that was needed was a relatively small number of strategically placed links. This left many site managers with a dilemma: follow the spammers or remain ethical and disappear.

Compounding the problem, Google started to place more relevancy on the new algorithm, almost to the point that a site could have no content on a subject and yet score better than those that had masses of content.

All this culminated in November with a major shake up of the SERPs, where thousands of highly relevant sites became casualties of the new series of filters.

The latest dance suggests that Google has realised its mistake and has righted some of the wrongs of recent months. Whether this is the case remains to be seen in the January dance. The new algorithm has caused many highly relevant sites to fall in SERPs just before Christmas, and for many commercial site owners this will have been devastating. Craig Nevill-Manning, Google's Senior Research Scientist, made the following comment: "I apologize for the roller-coaster. We're aware that changes in the algorithm affect people's livelihoods. We don't make changes lightly."

M.P.