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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Google's answer was Florida. The update with the tent much faster. The consequences are more recent
name of the US state triggered the second great crisis search results, making the Page Speed for the first time
in the search engine industry after the Black Monday. a relevant ranking factor. The same year, Google took
Due to the update, over optimized pages disappeared as well more action against illegal link building meth-
from the index, but nevertheless SEO wasn’t on the ods.
rope. On the contrary, it is becoming more important
than ever. SEO pages spring up like mushrooms. When the New York Times published an article about
DecorEyes, a firm that just used such measures,
Hence, Google released along with Yahoo and MSN Google punished the page massively. Even a warrant
the nofollow-tag in 2005 to group links according to sig- of arrest for the site owner followed. The story contin-
nificance. That year, Google Analytics started to see the ues in 2011, when the New York Times wrote again
light of day and provides SEOs with extensive opportu- about illegal link methods. This time from JCPennys
nities in the field of web analytics. and the method described was called Black Hat, which
is still regarded as a description of SEO methods that
Google's fight against SEOs continued and still does. In violate Google's policies. Google punished JCPennys
2006, for instance, Google banned BMW for tortious with a three-month penalty.
SEO measures. BMW responded and stopped the so-
called "cloaking" to get listed again in the results. This The Panda update sees the light of the day as well in
incident highlights how important search engine traffic 2011 and is directed against poor content that achieves
was already in 2006 for companies and how much pow- high rankings with it. User behavior is only one factor
er Google wielded at that early stage. that gives the Google Panda relevance. This step
changed the SEO world sustainably and laid the foun-
With XML-sitemaps came another option that supports dation for the current trend SEO named "good content".
the SEO work. In October 2006, Google bought 2011 also marks the launch of Google+ which the
YouTube, thereby laying the foundation for multimedia search giant is trying hard to establish by any means.
search that still gains momentum. The logical conse-
quence of Google's acquisition of YouTube 2006 is the In 2012 there was a new Google update called
launch of the Universal Search in 2007. Alongside video “Penguin”, directed at bad links and therefore also
and images appeared for the first time news and blogs against spam, so that link directories got hurt particular-
in search results. Except for some major Google up- ly hard. The impact of the update could still be felt the
dates, big SEO messages didn’t occur in 2008. Only the following year and Google continued the trend to offer
release of Google Suggest brought SEOs a still well- less and less space for organic search in favor of more
used tool. and more advertising.

In 2009, leading search engines introduced the 2013 another Google update made a splash, although
“Canonical Tag” to identify duplicate-content as such. It initially hardly anyone noticed it. Hummingbird is the
is at the same time a concession that duplicate content name of the update that provides a completely new
may just not always be preventable. Here, Google re- search algorithm that affects about 90% of all searches.
leased with "Vince" an update that stirred up the SERPs With the update, Google is driving forward the issue of
well and truly. Particularly large brands were profiting semantic search that the company wants to use in or-
from it. der to better understand the search intention and con-
sequently a more targeted answer. Furthermore, web-
The same year social media found its way into the site owners complain that Google is now displaying a
search results, too. Google and Microsoft were working huge preview via the image search, which partly leads
with Twitter to directly display tweets in the search. Alt- to massive traffic losses.
hough the deal is completely over by now, Google goes
again in the same direction by experimenting with the I will continue the topic and provide a glimpse into the
integration of Google+ posts. future of SEO next week, hoping that “all” generations
like getting the history of search for reflection.◊
Google's fight against bad and illegal links
By Daniela La Marca
In 2010, Google released a new update with the name
"Caffeine” that allows the search engine to index con-
MediaBUZZ Pte Ltd - Independant ePublisher for Asia