Whitehatmedia News

20/05/2006  |  The Brandy Update - Google

After the infamous “Florida” update at the end of 2003, Google is processing another update. According to many experts, these big updates Google is doing are good for the search engine if it wants to stay the main search engine. Even if it causes a lot of trouble to website owners, especially those who have spent a lot of time trying to optimise their site.

This time, Google is doing five main changes in its algorithm formula. The first one is simple in that the search engine wants to increase the size of its index.

The second change deals with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).This is a very significant new technology that Google has always been interested in. But what is it exactly. It's all about synonyms finally. LSI-based algorithms will look for words and links that pertain to related topics. The third change is about Links and Anchor Text. Links have always been the essence of Google. The importance of Page Rank (PR), Google's unique ranking system, is being steadily downgraded in favour of the nature, quality, and quantity of inbound and outbound link anchor text.

The fourth change concerns the website’s Neighbourhoods. Now and even more than before, the links to your website must be from related topic sites (the higher the PR the better); those links are seen to define your 'neighbourhood'.

The fifth change is related with the downgrading of Traditional Tag-Based Optimisation. Clever use of the title, h1, h2, bold, and italics tags, and CSS, is no longer as important to a site's ranking as it was in the past.