About Florida Algo Update

The Florida algo update on 16th November 2003 had a catastrophic effect on many web pages which were highly ranked and made a 180 degree turn in search engine optimization.

What was new in the Florida algo update?

This new Google algorithm update included first of all an SEO filter which means that after the listed page is generated for a specific keyword term or query, the new algorithm filtered out those pages which were supposed to use unethical SEO techniques.

With the Florida update Google was also applying a filter to some search terms which means that a search term list has been created to which a filter was connected and applied but only for those terms. It was also supposed that Google was lowering commercial websites rankings and listed higher those which were informational. As Google is making money by the Ads which appear on right side and in the top, it was supposed that Google was trying to force commercial websites to put more money in Advertising. Many have conducted a more in-depth research by studying this so called 'money word' filtering list and it turns out to be only a misconception simply because for Google as a widely renowned brand, it would be too risky to apply such measures which could lead to a significant decrease of their popularity as the king of the search engines.

With the Florida update Google has implemented a new feature named LocalRank i.e. pages were grouped in selected sets considering their interconnectivity and those linked from the same selected set were generally ranked higher.

Google also implemented with this new Florida algo update the 'stemming' meaning that he matches words with the same word stem like swim, swimmer, swimming. Now Google's database has increased and competition for rankings has enlarged together with the keywords making it possible to create more internal pages designated for same keyword terms but with different stemming.

Google has also introduced the spelling check tool which meant that whenever a search term was introduced Google suggested a spelled checked version of the given term if it was inappropriate or misspelled.

Google also realized the importance of another algorithm called Hilltop developed by Krishna Bharat from California in the year 2000. It is known that Google's PageRank system allocates a value of how important a page is based on the number of incoming links from other web sites, the higher the PR the higher the value. Krishna noticed that a web page with high PR referring by an off-topic keyword phrase often got high ranked for that non related phrase for which he developed the Hilltop algorithm. This way the authority value of a page was determined not only by the number of incoming links and those pages' PR but also the relevance of the referring pages. For those who want to study more about this algorithm a more detailed explanation is available here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/