About Brandy Algo Update
The Brandy algo update in February 2004 included five major features:
- first of all the search engine increases the size of its index
- the second is about Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
- the third is about links and anchored text
- the fourth involves web site neighborhoods
- the fifth is about downgrading tag-based optimization
Now let's describe a little bit each of them:
The increase of index size
The Google search engine's spider Googlebot has spidered much more content and the index was increased with much more websites
including pages which were dropped after the famous Florida update. This was also regarded by many as Google's desire to appear
in the media along with his top competitor Yahoo who took first step in this matter.
What do we understand by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)?
This algorithm is capable of matching words (synonyms) which are related to the same topic thus putting a page in the right related
context. A good example could be the term 'travel insurance' which can be linked with the term 'skiing' as someone
going for a vacation skiing might need travel insurance, as well as related to the terms 'holidays', 'airports' or
even 'medical'.
Links and anchor texts
Gradually Google has started downgrading its unique ranking system the PageRank (PR) factor by paying more attention to the nature,
quantity and quality of inbound and outbound link anchor text. It became very important that a particular link is leading to the
most relevant internal page with relevant anchored text. Google also looked at the number of outgoing links when deciding the
authoritative value of a web site.
What do we understand by 'web site neighborhoods'?
It is important that the pages which are linking to you have high PageRank (PR) but most important is the relevancy of those
referring pages which describes your site's neighborhood which of course should not be off-the-topic. When we are talking
about neighborhood remember what the LSI explains.
Downgrading traditional tag-based optimization
Using title tags H1, H2, ... bold and italic tags as well as CSS has no more such positive impact in the ranking of web sites.
Google now favors much less manipulative tactics like LSI and relevancy of links.
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