Brandy Update

Google’s Brandy update came out between late January and mid-February 2004, and is the official successor to the Austin Update. The Brandy Update resulted in improvements that benefited many falsely penalized websites by deactivating certain evaluation criteria which had been introduced by previous updates.

Changes

• The Brandy update did not change anything on Google ranking algorithm, instead the database or the index was modified. The effects of the Austin updates were partially reversed or decreased. Pages that were incorrectly taken off the Google index showed up again and some big spam sites that were not affected by the Austin update were permanently deleted from the Google index.

• Another big change was the inclusion of dynamic web pages in the index. This means that dynamically generated links were better recognized and thus ranked higher. Before the update, some 40 percent of the pages that had been scanned by Google, were not in the index. This was reduced to 20 percent with the Brandy update. Additionally, the ability to detect duplicate content was improved. As a result, the number of web pages in Google’s index increased by about a billion.

• The last major change concerned websites which abused blogs to get as many links as possible. Such websites were banned from the index or penalized.