The Florida update in November 2003 was considered as a game-changer for the search engine because it ushered in a new era of SEO. It rendered old SEO tactics useless and paved the way for digital marketing to become more interesting. This update became a catalyst for the current techniques that are used for online advertising nowadays.
Previous updates such as Cassandra and Dominic cracked down on unethical practices known as web spam. These algorithm changes aimed to improve the quality of websites in the SERPs by devaluing or penalizing those that tried to manipulate search bots with black hat tactics.
Florida ultimately put a stop to these techniques and rendered them ineffective in ranking a page since some e-commerce webmasters continued to exploit the system by placing keywords in the external links as anchor texts.
Florida’s significant impact in the Google Algorithm caused the crash of millions of e-commerce websites who were ranking high for particular keywords. As a result, they suffered from substantial losses in profit for their businesses. Others even disappeared from the SERPs completely.
These were the algorithmic changes that reportedly occurred during this update:
Google has continually expressed its advocacy to be user-centric. You should create content and plan your site’s navigational structure in a way that enhances user experience. Gone are the days where ranking is as easy as putting relevant keywords and their variations into a page. Now, you must put more thought into what you’ll be publishing and make sure that your readers enjoy what you’ve written.
Here’s a look at the differences between old school and today’s SEO: