The Brandy update, which rolled out over a few days from February 17 to 20, 2004, became known for the birth of Google’s new method of indexing called Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. A month before this change, Florida paved the way for a basic level of LSI called stemming which matches users’ queries with terms related to the root word.
During the launch of the update, some webmasters thought that it was a step back to the pre-Florida algorithm because the changes weren’t fully implemented yet. However, Google confirmed that Brandy involved the integration of new signals of quality for the search engine and improved the way they rank pages. Moreover, it also brought about new ways of measuring quality and relevance.
Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, announced that the search engine made five significant changes to its algorithm formulas in February 2004. While he didn’t expound on the details of these improvements, some believe that these involved index size, LSI, anchor texts, link neighborhoods, and tag-based optimization.
Here’s an in-depth look at each of the reported changes:
The update served as a foundation to today’s search engine system and modern SEO. While Google may still use LSI, it has definitely become more sophisticated. Merely incorporating synonyms in your content isn’t effective anymore. You should focus on structured data or adding labels to your information to help search engines index and crawl through your website faster. These markups provide more details on the page’s content.
These are the typical uses of structured data: