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Florida Update One Year Later - The Year Google
Grew Up
by Jim Hedger, Contributing Writer, November 17, 2004.
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It has been a full year since the infamous Florida Update rewrote Google's
rankings with a massive pre-Christmas purge of previously well placed
sites. The update, which caught virtually everyone by surprise is assumed
by most
to be the introduction of semantic contextualization software added to
a variation of the Hilltop
Expert Document Algorithm. It took Google about six to eight weeks to
re-establish stable listings and they took a savage beating in the SEO
press during that period. For a short time it looked like the shift was
a failure
with spammy sites and "big-box" stores dominating the Top listings
but after a while Google's listings began to make sense again.
The inclusion of Hilltop added great weight to certain types of links and
as Mike Banks Valentine points out in today's WebProNews,
radically cut the value of reciprocal links. Incoming links were the meat
and potatoes of PageRank but five years of commercialization had turned
them into junk food. Googlebot needed a better diet and direct one way reference
links from "credible" and relevant sites is considered much healthier
spider-food than the junk peddled by fast-link dealers or cooked up in kitchen-sink
sites between friends.
The Florida Update effected more than site rankings in the SEO industry.
New businesses sprang up finding, buying and selling links as SEOs and site
owners became obsessed with PageRank values and link-building. Savvy site
designers and a few SEOs began producing instant expert sites, using them
as "back-door leader-pages" designed to drive spiders rather than
attract them. Websites with incoming links from "authority sites" such
as news-sites, major forums and other high PageRank properties started to
rank better than they had before, thus increasing the value and popularity
of these authority sites.
Perhaps the greatest effect of the Florida Update was the sudden rise in
the popularity of BLOGS. As explained in dozens of articles over the past
two months, Blogs have become big, primarily because of their extraordinary
effect on link-densities at Google. When a thousand bloggers rapidly create
links to a specific website or Blog entry, that site or entry rapidly rises
in the rankings. Proof of this phenomena is found in the results of both
Google Ranking contests held earlier this year. The winner in both cases
harnessed the power of keyword enriched anchor text-links from thousands
of Blogs.
It is easy to speculate on Google's commercial interest in promoting incoming
links from Blogs and news-sites. Google owns the biggest Blog software developer,
Blogger, and has AdWords/AdSense being displayed across many "authority
sites". Google also controls the world's most popular News-Search tools,
Google-News. With the pressures of becoming a publicly traded company, Google
needs to harness as many revenue sources as possible. When you control the
environment, forcing a change in user behaviours may be simpler in the long
run than waiting for change to happen organically. There may be some merit
to this view. The people working for Google wouldn't be the geniuses they
are if they didn't see the financial angles but after a year has passed,
it appears the shift was motivated by much more complex changes happening
at the Googleplex.
Google has a number of interesting features and has been busy acquiring
the means to develop others. Through direct purchase of software (and often
the companies that make it), innovative in-house development and the massive
infusion of energy spurred by the IPO, Google has raced ahead of its competition
in the past three months and is seen to be leading in just about every facet
of search. It is rumoured to be developing a proprietary browser and may
even be working on a proprietary operating system. The introduction of a
semantic/context driven algorithm that values links from established authoritative
sites has improved Google's listings and provided the stability needed to
integrate Google's various features into a branded base of products. That
many of the most beneficial incoming links originate from websites already
involved with Google in one way or another, (aside from their own listings),
more likely stems from chasing the brand as opposed to chasing the buck.
Once the brand is established, the bucks tend to follow.
Google has established one of the most popular brands that has ever existed
but that brand, in most consumer's eyes, only extends to its search engine.
Google's founders have always stated that information-flow was their major
focus. Information, is a bigger word than search and requires a larger vision
to articulate. One year after the biggest shake-up in search engine history,
Google is positioning itself to surpass simple search and grow into branded
information provision.
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