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understand the Google SERPs history

Everflux appeared before June 2002. Google was integrating the results of the "fresh crawl" into their index daily. Seems some kind of PR-on-the-fly calculation had been in-place for this advance to be possible.

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Yet, until that bombshell of an update called Florida (circa Nov 2003), Google SERPs were relatively static per month. Those roughly, monthly updates were highly expected by webmasters. They displayed results for whatever Google had eaten in the past few weeks. This included, I believe, a major PR re-calculation. This was to replace the everflux "estimated" PR.

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In those nearly pre-historic days, it seems PR was being precisely crunched about once a month. This included some form of estimated PR (quick PR) being used for fresh crawl web pages.

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Beginning with the Florida update (which had 3-4 months of behind-the-scenes preparation), Google used a very different type of ranking calculation. We no longer had the fun of monthly updates. Still, there was everflux. In addition, there were lower-level algorithm shifts. These were created by "dial turning" of the existing algorithm. Major updates began occurring only when entirely new algorithm factors were installed. Each new factor was complete with its own set of "dials".

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How long before we started noticing the sandbox effect, after Florida. Was it about 6 months, or less? PR was already being continuously re-calculated for over a year at that point. During this period, we saw no sandbox effect.

posted by Don Marchand @ 2:08 AM