Another Hurricane A-Comin’?

Funny that I was in Florida last week, because the webmaster boards are lighting up with speculation that Google is about to do another major update to its index. When this happens, the rankings of many keywords and websites shift dramatically, with major implications for the business models of thousands of small sites.

The last major update, dubbed Florida, was just about a year ago, and it killed a lot of affiliate spam. But it also took out a lot of innocent bystanders. Site owners and the SEO community are battening down their hatches, as the holidays are usually the times when Google hurricanes hit. Why? That’s when the pressure to make money on the web is most intense (many online retailers make 80% of their profits in the fourth quarter). That means the attempts to game Google also intensify. Should be fun to watch…but I wouldn’t want to be a small online retailer right about now…