morpheus - 4:14 am on Dec 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

OK, a lot has been said about Florida but what is really needed are real-life examples. Here’s my 2 penny's-worth.

For the first 2 weeks Florida was a huge success for us with new pages indexed and included and revenue doubling. Then, just as the topic became mainstream in the UK we lost placement with almost every page - down about 10 places only, but it halved revenue (or a quarter of the new revenue, for those paying attention!)

Fortunately for us, Inktomi took up the slack 2 days later so we didn't lose much, but it could have been a disaster.

Four weeks on, and the situation has reversed. Google has now put back all the terms and given them a good placement. Result? A nice little earner!

OK, so we were lucky to have Inktomi 'fall in' at just the right time (leading to most of our traffic for 2 weeks coming from MSN), but the issue is still valid: what's happening with Google?

As far as we are concerned, they kept all previous data but gave preference to older data. Even so, they downgraded that data in the SERPs.

I have never posted before, but am very experienced (although SEO isn't my business), and wonder if the old issue of old (unchanged) data taking preference has come back, but with a site's SERP placement reduced if there is a lot of new data to process?

You can fanny around with everything else - anchor text etc, but our site hasn't changed for months and still it was hit by Florida. Thank God that now it's back up there where it belongs, but what a wake-up call for how powerful Google has become.