How many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?

Matt's answer:

We have a question from Pulkit. And I hope it is Pulkeet. If it is Pulkit, I apologize, I grew up in Kentucky, I am a country boy. I am not that great with all the names, uh, but it is a really good question. And they asked, “Can you please tell us: a. How many changes did Google make to their primary search algorithm in 2009? And b. Is content still king or is something else like structure taken over?” So my rule of thumb is that we tend to make a change to our core search algorithms at least once a day. So, we might batch it up, and go to a meeting once a week, where we talk about 8 or 10 or 12 or 6 different things that we would want to launch, but then after those get approved, and we are convinced that they work and they work well in a lot different languages, those will rollout as we can get them into production. So once you have got the pipeline churning, on average, we tend to rollout 350-400 things per year. So, about one thing per day, that can be a change in how we segment a language or better synonyms or webspam improvement, um, but those are things that are significant but not always noticed outside of Google. Um, is content still king? I think content is necessary, it is not always sufficient, because people have to find out about your content. You have to find out some way of marketing to people or, uh you know, getting the authority or the reputation where people will come to you to find out about your content. Or find some hook or some appealing way to get people to want to find out what information you have. But if you do not have good content, it is a lot harder to do good searching optimization for your site. So, I would start with that, and then once you have good content, think about how to find out where the rest of the world is so you can sort of tell them, “Hey, this is this great content that I have.”

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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