Google Dance: How Google Updates

Do the Google Dance A long time ago, back in ancient times (before the days of rolling updates), Google updated in bits and pieces. A major index update could take several days to complete. Meanwhile, you might see mild to wild fluctuations in the SEŘPS. 10 times a year, Google called all its data centers together, along with its index, cache and secondary indexes, and threw a big shindig – the Google Dance. In August 2003, Google changed the way the index updates, from piece meal to rolling updates. In other words, Google is constantly updating; it's only when the updates are major that most people really notice. – And some of Google's updates have really been noticed... 2002 Geogle September 2002 - Google's update causes uproar. 404 pages show up - in the top 10 of the SERPS. PageRank dies an early death... for the first time. kGogo 2003 Early to mid 2003 - Google SERPS swing wildly, then settle. By the time Cassandra, Dominic and Esmeralda updates are done, Google has killed multiple linking from self-owned sites and the same C IPs. SEOS start thinking maybe page titles and link text matter. Google November 2003 Google Florida update is a presidential fail as far as the SEO community is concerned. High-ranking pages cease to exist in the indexes for no apparent reason. Relevance drops; on-topic connections are as solid as baby Swiss cheese. January 2004 Austin update finishes off those who managed to survive Florida. Google fires LocalRank, LSI, stemming and other bullets at current optimization techniques. Free for all link farms, stuffed meta tags, high keyword density, hidden tags, invisible text all suffer a resounding defeat. The days of easy SEO are gone. Google October 2005 Google's been busy testing, tweaking and rolling out small update after small update. Then Jagger comes along, bringing some serious changes to the SERPS, algorithms and the world of SEO. Optimizers look at the possibilities of increased importance on IBL and OBL relevancy, canonical issues and others. Google attacks link-mongering, blog spam and CSS spam. The Big Daddy search engine gets tired of people mucking with their results. 2006 - 2009 More updates, more tweaking, more changes; when asked about the next major update, Matt Cutts says somewhere between 300 and 550 updates were implemented in 2009 alone. Holy smokes, batman! January 2009 update, "Vince" favors some established brands over web pages that might otherwise have good content but are not as well known in an attempt to provide more relevant results for specific terms. Topeka April 2010 Busy, busy, busy. Google rolls out Real Time Search, throwing the SEO - industry into an uproar. Is SEO dead? Nah, it's just faking it. Google Suggest gets a long awaited update. Meanwhile, Localsearch gets a little more Google love to tighten the results. Mayish 2010 Mayday update and insuing panic. The Mayday update has been called "the day the long tail died". It's a little bit of stretch, but many sites lost anywhere from 5 - 15 % of normal long tail traffic. Ouch. SEOS at Web Master World caution newbies not to panic. Wait until we know it's all over before you make massive site changes. June 2010 Google completes the roll out of Caffeine, promising 50% fresher results in the SERPS. Caffeine holds almost 100 million gigabytes of storage, adding 100,000 + more per day. This ramped up, search engine on crack points towards the future and "faster than the speed of thought" thinking. The precurser to "Instant"? We think so... September 2010 Introducing Google Instant, which searches before you type. With this fantastic little addition, you save 2 seconds on every search. - Or, you lose several minutes each time you try to research something and get side-tracked by other suggestions. For SEOS, this makes things a little bit harder (SE0 dies again). For search marketers and PPC suppliers, those little ads really have to count. Google October 2010 The official Google blog introduces Google Places (the search). Places results show up directly in the SERPS for specific types of searches. A new Places link appears in the Google sidebar. At this point, the faint of heart optimizers have jumped ship. Only the grizzly veterans are left - and the newbies who don't know any better. January 2011 A minor algorithmic change removes places like JCPenny & Overstock.com from their previously coveted spots in the top 10 for umpteen searches. Google startes coming down on well-known sites, including the Huffington Post, for spammy keyword lists and high term density. GA Coogle February 2011 Google attacks low quality content with a vengence. affecting more than – 11% of the U.S. search results. The algo change also targets content scrapers and other low quality sites. A subsequent update clears up another 2% of the SERPS, with a tighter focus on content scraping. Copyright 2011 Level343.com - All Google logos are copyrighted by Google http://www.google.com/logos/logoso4-4.html