The main reason why Google remains the king when it comes to search engines is the frequent changes it makes to its algorithm to make the user experience worthwhile. The minor changes in the algorithm are very frequent, whereas, every few months a major update rolls about in the algorithm.

The analysis of these changes on yearly basis can help web marketing services providers to better analyze the performance of a website pre and post the updates. This writing is the first part of the details of algorithm updates that took place in the last decade.

Year 2000:

In the year 2000, Google introduced only one major change in December. The update is given below:

Google Toolbar- Google Toolbar came with Toolbar Page Rank, which introduced the concept of page rank, and all the webmasters started trying to achieve the highest rank possible.

Year 2002:

In the month of September 2002, Google introduced an un named update, the brief description of which is given below.

1^st Documented Update- The details of this update still remain unclear; however, the areas around which this update revolved were PageRank and Google Dance update.

Year 2003:

The year 2003 witnessed several updates on part of Google. The major updates rolled out by Google in this year are given below.

Boston- This is the first named update by Google, rolled out in February 2003. This update revolved around index and algorithm changes.

Cassandra- The update came about in April 2003, targeting mainly, the hidden links, and linking from co-owned domains.

Dominic- This update was introduced in May 2003, and its working was also mysterious. The update seemed to hit the reporting of backlinks.

Esmerelda- It was the last of monthly updates rolled in June 2003. This update was mainly concerned with some infrastructural changes at Google.

Fritz- With Fritz update, the Google monthly dance ended, and now the index changed on daily basis.

Supplemental Index- To cater more documents in indexing, without compromising on performance, Google introduced the Supplemental Index update in September 2003.

Florida- This update truly put the SEO industry in front, by rejecting the old keywords based tactics. The update was introduced in November 2003.

Year 2004:

The major updates of year 2004 are given below.

Austin- Austin update in January 2004 covered the loop holes left by Florida update. This update targeted, deceptive META-tag stuffing, and on-page tactics.

Brandy- This update, introduced in February 2004, dealt with index expansion, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and anchor text relevance.

Year 2005:

The major algorithm changes rolled out by Google in 2005 are:

Nofollow- This update strictly emphasized on the quality of links, by controlling the spam links. This update was implemented in collaboration with other search engines in January 2005.

Allegra- This update was introduced in February 2005 and its implication remain ambiguous. Some believe it affected LSI, while others believed it affected the sandbox.

Bourbon- According to speculations made by webmasters, this update dealt with non-canonical URLs, and duplicate content. The update surfaced in May 2005.

XML Sitemaps- This update superseded the traditional HTML maps, and gave SEO services professionals some control over indexing and crawling in June 2005.

Personalized Search- Though with small affect, this update gave search engines ability to adjust results according to the search history of user. It was the second update in June of the same year.

Gilligan- In September 2005, Webmasters witnessed changes in search, however Google denied it of being any kind of algorithm update.

Google Maps- In October 2005, this update changed the SEO world, when Google inculcated data of Maps into LBC.

Jagger- The second update of October that dealt with reciprocal links, low-quality links, and link farms.

Big Daddy- The update was released in December 2005, and dealt with URL canonicalization, redirects, and Indexing timeline.

Conclusion:

The year 2000-2005 showed a switch in Google’s policy to roll out updates, where the updates ceased to roll out on monthly basis, and the index was updated daily. These updates laid the foundation for other major updates to come in the coming years.

The Part II of this report will give an insight to the major algo updates that have taken place from 2006 till present. So if you want to complete your Algorithm Updates knowledge of past decade, then wait for the soon to come second part of this post.

The biggest and perhaps the most adverse reaction was seen on internet in the month of January, against the SOPA and PIPA. A majority of world-renowned websites protested against these bills and displayed various banners on their website in opposition of this bill.

Meaning of SOPA and PIPA:

Both SOPA and PIPA are acronyms, where;

• SOPA represents the Stop Online Piracy Act
• PIPA represents Protect IP Act.

Ills of the Bills:

Both these bills are not accepted at all among the circle of internet marketing companies, as well as simple home users of internet. The reasons for it being bad are:

• SOPA and PIPA are not welcomed because of their ‘intellectual property infringement’ definition. The definition presented in the bill is extensively vague, and covers almost each and every thing on the internet, meaning that the entire internet is infringed.
• The other reason is the strict penalties they apply. According to the bill, a website which is found guilty in hosting of copyright material, then the website will face severe consequences in the form of, ban of making payments via PayPal, Google AdWords getting disabled, search engine will be ordered to take away all your website links, the ISP would block access to your website, and so on.
• With this bill, the earlier running DMCA of 1998, will be no more applicable, according to which only the users were held accountable for the content they share and not the website. With this bill, the websites will be held accountable for the content they host, rather than the user who shares the content. This would mark the end of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

The Reason For Their Implementation:

Though everyone hates these bills, but there are a few people who support it either intentionally or unintentionally. These are:

• The first group that apparently would benefit from these bills is the music and movie studios. With YouTube and other file sharing websites gone; these groups will be the leader of their domain. However, these brands are the only partly benefiting from this bill.
• The other group that is unintentionally supporting the bill in congress, who apparently has no idea whatsoever; about the destruction, these bills will bring to the internet. They are doing it for the benefit of one group (above mentioned) only, while penalizing the rest of internet world.

Implications of the Bills:

There are two major implications of these bills, which when seen collectively, sum up the whole of internet.

• The first implication would be the death of small businesses on the internet. Small businesses are with small budget, and they chose internet because of its affordability, if they were to be allegated with any act of infringement, then they certainly would not bear it. Therefore, new businesses would stop to step up into the online world.
• The second implication would be seen on the online internet marketing process. With social media out of the scene, and link building losing its importance, the whole online marketing process will die, and there would be no market online.

Conclusion:

In short, both these SOPA and PIPA bills would only benefit one business group and would exterminate the rest of the online world, and the online world would literally turn into the stone age, where there would be no information available to the user, neither would internet be as facilitating as it is today.

Since the launch of Google’s Panda update, the way things were conducted in SEO arena has totally changed. The major three impacts of the update can be seen on:

• Content Quality
• User experience and design
• Usage and user metrics

These three levels of impact have made the job for an SEO professional more difficult. Initially an SEO had to worry about the arranging content, but now an SEO has to generate and manage high-quality content.

When it comes to content, Panda Update shows Google’s strictness toward duplicity of the content. The new websites are complying with Panda Update, but the problem lies for the websites that were running before panda update, and have content that does not comply with the update. The lines below explain the penalties a website can face due to this Update, and how can a website rectify the issues pertaining to it.

1. True Internal Duplicate Content:

This type of duplication in content is most common and occurs when you create substantially unique URLs for the same content on your website. Regardless of the purpose, you are using these different links for the same URL,

• Google will regard these unique URLs as deliberate try from your part to trick the search engine algorithm.
• For this act, Google will penalize your website for using bad practices to promote your page.

Solution- The only solution to remove internal duplicity of content is to remove all the corresponding URLs for the same content, and try to develop fresh URL for fresh content.

2. True Outside of Site Duplicate Content:

If you avail the services of an internet marketing company, they will specially warn you about true duplicate content outside the website. This type of content is one, which appears in search results under different domains. If such a thing happens, then

• Google will regard all this appearance of same content under different domains as SERPs noise, and would consequently penalize.

Solution- The simple and straight solution for this problem (provided you are the owner of all the domains), is the creation of cross-domain canonical tag, in which you would select a main URL, and rest of the URLs will direct to the main URL.

3. Internal Near-Duplicates:

Websites that adopt the strategy of generating content and then with slight alteration, adding few strategic keywords in the title, to gain high ranking for themes or locations, often get penalized for this tactic. This type of tactic can be seen in:

• The websites of national companies, like insurance companies, which have the same theme, and try to attain high ranking by changing some part of text.
• The ecommerce companies, which have various product pages, and can’t afford to write fresh content for each product.

Solution- The only solution, though not feasible from monetary aspect, is to re-write and create new and fresh content.

4. External Near-Duplicates:

This type of duplication occurs when a website has other partner or affiliate websites, which borrow the content of the website. In such a case,

• Google will treat the website as it does treat any other website involved in duplicate content.

Solution- The solution suggested by most of the SEO services providers, is to add a few pieces of user generated content to the original content. In case your website has some affiliate or partner websites, then the partner website when borrowing your content, should add a few pieces of user generated content to the original content. This is a quite effective and low cost solution to the problem of external near duplicity in content.

Other Penalties and Solutions:

Besides the major penalties mentioned above, the other ways in which Panda Update affects a website are:

• Large ecommerce websites, that store the internal search pages, are penalized by Google, the solution for them is to start noindexing of their internal search pages, so that they don’t appear in SERPs.
• Websites that have numerous ads on their pages also are penalized, regardless of the quality content they have. Therefore, a website should have few high performing ads, compared to several low performing ads.

Conclusion:

Google Panda update has severely struck the market and changed the way online marketing was done. For websites, which existed prior to this update, it is difficult to comply totally with the update. However, by removing old pages that do not perform well for the website, and by updating new content after having it verified for duplicity, will make sure that the website clears the Panda based penalty with ease and without any complications.

Internet has definitely turned into something as necessary as blood running through our veins, delivering what different body parts need to be delivered for optimal performance. The mass-fame that internet enjoys today, is greatly indebted to valuable contributions of internet marketing.

In fact, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC marketing (Pay-per-Click) are terms almost everybody using internet seems to be aware of. This article, however, is intended to increase your knowledge about how SEO concerns can tackle the biggest of their challenges, i.e. developing a perfectly optimized page that can bring them in some real web traffic, followed by real business and money.

Many people might not be pleased to know that there are no hard & fast rules for that, but reading through this article would help SEOs in achieving betterment in on-page keyword targeting, so here it goes:

HTML Head Tags

It includes various areas like:

• Title: Definitely one of the most important on-page keyword elements, which should employ the keyword/key-phrase as the very first word, most preferably. There are some highly reliable studies concluding that page titles with first word as keyword/key-phrase enjoy highest correlation with top rankings.

• Meta Description: Not really known to be relied for “ranking” by any major contemporary search engines, Meta description still provides keyword/key-phrase a better place to host, because of the bolding it receives within the visual snippet when search results are displayed. So, you better apply it rather than quitting on it.

URL

• Length: Relevant statistics suggest that shorter URLs offer better results in search and their probability of being copied/pasted as compared to lengthy URLS, by other sites, is much higher.

• Keyword Location: In a given URL, the closer you use keyword(s) to the domain name, the better off you are with on-page keyword targeting.

Body Tags

• H1 Headline: Significance of H1 tag has long been known to SEO people, but recent correlation studies reveal a significant drop in its correlation to high ranking. However, yet it serves many important purposes from various SEO perspectives. Therefore, using it is recommended more than abandoning it.

• H2/H3/H4/Hx: Well, these tags have gone a step lower than H1, and are recommended to apply where needed mandatorily.

• Alt Attribute: To many people’s surprise, the alt attribute, comes out superior to H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. tags as far as its correlation with high rankings is concerned.

Internal Links Architecture

• Click-Depth: What majority of SEO pros suggest is that the more highly competitive and highly challenging a keyword/key-phrase is, the more it needs to be located higher in a website’s internal architecture. This would require a fewer clicks by users from home page to access the particular URL containing a specific keyword.

• Number of Internal Links: Search engines seem to reward highly “linked-to” pages, helping them more with higher rankings. Therefore, for highly competing keywords/key-phrases, links from greater number of pages would result more positively.

Page Architecture

• Keyword Location: The consent of majority of SEO pros is that important keywords/key-phrases should be featured preferably among the first few words (more appropriately, through 50-100 words) of the textual content of a webpage. Most of the concerned studies also confirm the fact that search engines tend to reward such pages better the ones employing keywords deep down their textual content.

Conclusion

No matter if you are pursuing SEO as an enthusiast or as a dedicated internet marketing firm, the better you follow and practice these tips, the better you will yield results in your On-page keyword targeting. The best way to get ahead of your competitors is to apply unique and effective techniques sooner than later.

So, if you want to see better results from your SEO endeavors, you better understand and follow what you get through this article.

Google is definitely the force to reckon in the virtual world. The way Google caters the diversified needs of web surfers, particularly in the domain of search engines, is simply worth mentioning. Not only is their assistance to web surfers evident from the innovations of Google Search Engine, but they also fascinate them with products like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most preferred choice of web surfers who want to explore newer avenues of their web presence, much beyond simply accessing a URL with the help of Google, the search engine. It offers powerful web tracking to anyone maintaining a web presence, sufficing the needs of individual web marketing enthusiasts to the needs of giant online enterprises.  In fact, the Google AdWords customers can access their Analytics data from within their AdWrods account.

It Serves The Best For

Though it is designed to cater the needs of multiple audiences, the major beneficiaries of Google Analytics can include:

Executives

• Helps them define marketing initiatives most effective for them

• Provides them with precise traffic patterns and trends on their website

• Helps them determine the customer segments that can be most valuable to them

Marketing Professionals

• They are informed about the source of visitors on their site and what they like to do there

• Serves them with useful information on how to convert simple visitors into actual customers

• Informs them about the particular keywords with most potential of conversion

• Also informs them which of their ads is most (would be) most effective

Content And Web Developers

• This group of users gets informed about possible reasons why people leave their site without acting the way they wanted

• Google Analytics can also point towards any website design elements responsible for the situation mentioned above

• Also lets them know the kind of site content people wish to see in a particular domain

Google Analytics Updates

Well, this is not all about it. Serving icing on the cake is the fact that Google vows to improve all their products and services, taking cue from user feedback and expectations. In this case also, Google has quite recently announced an amazing update for Google Analytics, referred as Google Analytics Version 5.

Some Major Features

The major updates include:

• Significantly redesigned Google Analytics platform to support enhanced new functionalities

• Enhanced user interface to facilitate users getting the information they need most conveniently

• Improved report generation mechanisms for generation of faster and efficient reports

These are the generalized enhancements that run through Google Analytics Version 5. Some specific improvements worth your attention include:

Real Time Analytics

Real-Time reporting is perhaps the show stealer as far as improvements in this version of Google Analytics are concerned. It will update the user with the current happenings on their site by virtue of real-time report generation, displaying each page-view just seconds after the actual proceedings on the page. The “Home” tab present in new dashboard will host all Real-Time reports for consultation.

Multi-Channel Funnels

Multi-Channel Funnels, as included in latest version of Google Analytics, enable you to track in-detail activities of your visitors, tracking them 30 days before converting or purchasing from you. The coverage will include customer’s interaction with a host of media channels, from clicks on paid as well as organic searches, social networks, display ads, and affiliates.

Mobile Reporting

The addition of Mobile Reporting in the latest update of Google Analytics would allow you to proceed abreast to future of web, i.e. mobile web. Mobile reports will allow you insight into how people approaching your site act and interact with your website using different kinds of mobile devices, thus enabling you to devise even better strategies to cater this expanding segment of customers. Social media is the current happening of the web and this kind of aid serves ideal to your social media marketing endeavors.

Flow Visualization

It enables you a highly enhanced and sophisticated graphical display of visitors’ navigation through your site. This definitely gives you a better idea how interaction of your customers is proceeding with your site.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Google Analytics Version 5 shall help you signify your online presence irrespective of your online status and stature with its amazing new features. The sooner you get along with it, the better it will yield you, so you better start exploring it as soon as possible, before your competitors leave you behind in this battle of survival and progress.