Google Florida Update - SMM Gives Interpretation and Analysis

An executive summary of what happened in the Google Florida Update, what are likely to be the reasons, and what can be done to succeed in regaining high Search Engine Rankings.

(PRWEB) December 31 2003--What has come to be known as the Florida Update of the Google search engine has caused massive upsets in the Internet Marketing world. Since no information is released by Google, there has been much speculation in the on-line marketing world on what has changed during this update. SMM has published a review and analysis of what occurred during late November and early December.

A key factor in Google's ranking of sites in keyword searches has been PageRank. Named after Larry Page, one of the two co-founders of Google, this measures the number of other websites that have a link to the particular website. Some website owners arranged artificially to have a large number of other websites with a link to their own website. This is expressly against the Google Quality Guidelines. These forbid the creation of multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. They also discourage the use of "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. Loosely these practices are known as search engine spamming.

Many commentators stated that Google had put in filters to block websites that were using spamming techniques. What is much more likely is that such "spamming" links were given very low weightings. Conversely links from expert or authority sites unconnected with the website have seen their weightings boosted. This caused some websites to disappear from the ranking lists and in turn caused the huge uproar.

Far less attention has been paid to another change during the Florida update that is much more important. In April 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, a company working in the field of ontology, which deals with concepts or "meaning". There are one or two subtle signs that Google has switched to searches on "meaning" rather than searches on keywords. This will have profound implications for Google searches in the future. It will also make the coming search engine war as Yahoo drops Google and Microsoft unveils its own search engine even more interesting.

SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal provides Internet Marketing Strategy services to manufacturing and service companies. Further details on the above can be found in the latest Newsletter, "Who's Naughty, Who's Nice ... Google Christmas 2003".

Editor's Note: The full contents of the above mentioned newsletter can be found at: http://www.strategicmarketingmontreal.ca/newsletter-35.htm.