THE GOOGLE STOLE CHRISTMAS!

Google created a stir around the world with webmasters and search engine optimizers left in shock after it's November update dubbed "Florida".

Many companies who were previously ranked highly by the Search Engine have now dropped off the charts leaving them bewildered and penniless for Christmas. In anger some people believe Google has purposely changed it's ranking algorithm to knock out the commercial freeloaders forcing them to turn to Google paid advertising. Others are turning to their optimizers seeking answers to the quickest way to gain back their top positions.

Google officials claim it's a normal update to produce better relevancy - yet many relevant sites have fallen foul of the indexing and are no longer easily found.

Taking a closer look at the "Florida Update" shows us that this is far from a normal update. A number of new factors come into play that could explain the major upheaval.

Firstly stemming. Google now declares it has changed from previously non-stemmed results to stemming. For those who do not know the term, stemming will show results for not just the word "travel" but also "traveling", "traveler" and "travelers" (note the American spelling).

Next a new filter to prevent a problematic search result has reportedly been put in place. Simply put, if a person searched for a popular two word phrase accompanied by a unique word the resulting pages baulked and stopped displaying results.

Finally stop phrases. Previously Google would filter out certain common words from your search terms but now even phrases like "how do I" are being filtered out.

More factors: A number of other factors have come into play in the new Google search results but are too numerous to be covered by this article. To find out more, contact our optimizer(Theresa Fitzgerald) who can help you through these major changes :.

Page Updated: 7th April 2005. Site Published: 10th February 2000.