Google's Boubon update review

Cosmetic Changes at Google Precede Larger Overhaul: "By Jim Hedger - June 08, 2005 Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday...

For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on “ethical SEO” practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on “supplemental listings”, crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.

Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time.

As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google’s teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time now and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex. "