Florida Update (Google)

2004 - In many ways 2004 was the year the industry will never forget, it benchmarked the sheer power that Google had.

In the aftermath of the Florida Update, webmasters and marketing managers were unable to grasp exactly what had happened and why. Most people didn’t know what to fix or why to fix it.... most decided to ride out the storm. The problem was that the storm never finished, it took some months for the index to settle and for the industry to understand the scale of the nuclear bomb that had exploded. For many it was over.

There were cries of 'lets just use MSN and Yahoo' ringing through the industry but of course Google had the market and all the aces. The next three months saw the whole corporate industry changing tack, the trend started in the previous year for the PPC vehicle was now a stampede. Suddenly everyone was a paid search expert and offered management and analysis in a way never seen before.

The real truth is that for the main part of the market Organic Search was now dead, in the subsequent months there were more aftershocks and more casualties. Google was now all powerful and its revenue stream was into orbit... just in time for April's IPO. Of course this made Google billionaires and Google millionaires and was a far cry from the early days of webmaster idealism back in 1996, it was all so different then!!

As they say though out of every cloud comes a silver lining, like us, many agencies had moved towards site improvement and ethical SEO. To work genuinely to make a website receptive to Google and other search engines, we were a couple of years ahead of most and in many ways were unaffected by Florida.

It became apparent that this was the future of our industry The constant drive by search engines to deliver search results and to make money means that our industry will always be a turbulent one. So in late 2004 we decided to start our move towards the issue of compliancy.

The Florida Update changed the industry forever, ethical website improvement is the only way forward and there is now no room for smart 'black hat' tactics. PPC is now firmly embedded in the marketing strategy and SEO is a part of SEM and each few months there will be further shake ups as the technology employed by search facilities just gets better and better.

Whilst all this was going on the search engine world saw Yahoo move to purchase a number of major facilities and subsequently it also needed to re-brand and rationalise them. MSN was preoccupied with developing its own new brand of search ready for release and to try to compete with Google.

China started to emerge as a major Internet player and of course search technology will be heading towards them, I wonder if they know what’s coming?

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