The far-field optical technology of single gold-nanorod(AuNR) has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. Because of special local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) property, AuNR particles have high conductivity of optical signals localized on the surface from physical or chemical irritants. The mechanism, application, progress and novel optical characteristics of AuNRs in optical detection and spectroscopy method are being reviewed in our work. The paper describes an overall introduction as follows: (1)various related technologies on AuNR scattered spectrum, including dark-field technology, homodyne and heterodyne technology, photonic crystal technology, spatial modulation, polarization modulation technology,etc; (2) the properties of AuNR scattered spectrum, including spectral line-shape functions, effects of line-width and substrate, comparison of theoretical and experimental spectrums,etc; (3) the development of related spectrum technologies in recent years. The paper focuses on the method of far-field optical scattering based on LSPR and mainly discusses the linear method based on AuNRs, such as direct and indirect scattering detection method. We also put emphasis upon studying the importance of medium environment (for example, substrate, the molecules combined on surface and other nanomaterials) and the influence on scattered spectrum and the extinction rate. Of particular note is the quantitative method and correlation studies of AuNR’s surface and morphology, and its character is that most of the methods are compared with theoretical model and experiments in terms of accuracy. The combination of the experiments and theoretical tools can be used to explain the optical properties of single gold-nanorod particle in detail