However, unlike other Google search results updates, the "Florida Update" - as this event has come to be known - caught a good many search engine professionals and online business owners off guard. The reason? Many search results were shifted dramatically from their previous positions, in some cases entire blocks of the first 100 results were replaced with new listings. This had the effect of 'demoting' previously high-ranking sites and relegating them to the netherworld of Google’s search results in pages 4 and up.

While the Florida Update has confused, frustrated and angered many professional search engine marketers and their clients - small to medium sized online businesses - Google has been characteristically silent on exactly what was changed in the search algorithm and why.

The only comment that can be found on the subject comes via a quote from Forbes magazine in which Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google, said the change is part of the Silicon Valley-based company's efforts to provide high-quality search results.

"This particular change affected more people, but our testing shows there was a significant quality improvement for our users," said Rosing.

Shortly after the Florida update, several people reported an interesting trick to figure out if the new Google Algorithm affected your rankings. The trick is to add a non-existent garbage term to the end of your keyword with a dash before it. For example if your keyword is "laptops", you would search for "laptops -dsfdsfdf". However, you will have to add one garbage term for each additional word in your search term. For example, if your keyword is "used laptops", then you would search for "used laptops -dsfdsff -dsfdsfdsf". If you search for our given example, you will see different results in the top 10.

There are a number of theories that have emerged - we will list and examine a few below. Remember - these are people's opinion - not fact. Until Google makes some type of official announcement, speculation is all that we have.

Speculation #1: Google quashed commercial results to increase revenues in its AdWords paid listing program prior to going public. The idea here is that by relegating lucrative commercial search listings to the unread bottom of the search results, the businesses would have to resort to Google’s AdWords program to get back to the top of the search results. The resulting revenue increase would benefit Google by inflating the IPO stock price.

Speculation #2: This is just a regular and innocent attempt by Google to reduce the prevalence of search engine spammers. This theory notes that some of the demoted sites could be construed as "artificially" increasing their Google rankings via multiple interconnected and commonly owned and linked web sites. This is known in search engine marketing lingo as "gaming the system" or "spamming the search engines". Since Google frowns on the practice of interconnecting sites with one common owner simply to increase rankings, the update is viewed as justified to reduce these artificially inflated search results.

Speculation #3: In order to remove patent restrictions Google introduced a newer "patent-free" algorithm. There has been speculation that the technology that drives Google's search results may have been patented and licensed from Stanford University and/or The National Science Foundation. This theory holds that the algorithm change was implemented in order to avoid paying royalties on these patents.

Speculation #4: The Florida Update represents a complete and total change in the way that Google calculates search results. This group suggests that the Applied Semantics technology acquired by Google is now being used on a search-by-search basis - in effect applying an "expert system" to "learn" which results are best for users. As search after search is conducted, the system adjusts the results based on what users end up clicking on. This theory holds that traditional "spidering" on sites and current PageRank systems will become less and less important to search results.

Speculation #5: The Google systems and algorithm simply became overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and complexity of the Internet - in effect they have run out of computational overhead. Some have suggested that the new search results are in essence a "bug" in the Google code - brought on by the incredibly daunting task of evaluating the billions of web pages out there and sorting them into meaningful results. Further, the prevalence of blogs and blog cross-links seems to have thrown a curve into the Google algorithm mix.

There are many, many more theories and variations on the above listed hypotheses. With all the secrecy surrounding Google's ranking algorithms, their updating process in general, and their future plans, we may never know what really happened in the Florida Update. Like I said before, at this point - speculation is all we have.

Based on an analysis and research done by us here at Submit Express, we have figured out that the new algorithm lowers rankings of those sites that are over optimized for those keywords that are repeated too many times in the following areas: anchor text of incoming links, Site Title and Page Content. Our recommendation at this point to those that have been affected is to analyze their own rankings first and make adjustments to their site by lowering keywords in some of those areas. Anchor text of the incoming links, seem to be the most prominent factor. We would suggest that if you used keywords in your site links, to remove them or not to use the same keywords too many times. Again our own analysis may not be 100% accurate, but this is our closest guess to what may have happened.

In addition to the above algorithm change, Google also started listing 3 Froogle results on top the Google search results for certain terms. If you are not familiar with Froogle, basically it is a shopping search engine that Google launched about a year ago. For more details see our newsletter article from January 2003.

The Froogle results will only appear for certain ecommerce related products. You can see an example by typing in "Dell laptops" in Google.

We wish good luck to those that have been affected by this latest Google fiasco.