We study the formation of plasmon modes of small gold clusters by modeling the excitation spectra. The shape change of the longitudinal mode as a function of cluster size is studied using time-dependent Kohn-Sham theory and Gaussian basis sets. The presence of d electrons in gold atoms affect the plasmon formation process, resulting in a high excitation energy for transverse mode and a complicated spectra profile in general. The transverse mode can still be identified with the help of a frozen-orbital approximation.