Googles New Algorthm Opens a Black Hole

.. but this one is not something you can take advantage of and increase rankings of your website. It is scarier then that, and it was created by Google itself in their no-excuse anti seo rampage.

Their block this and block that, too much of this and too much of that patches inevitably created a new black hole. While many of us try to see the positive side of each and every patch that is being created, adapt to that change in an attempt to succeed others are closely monitoring what these changes are for and what are the consequences by not adapting and try to figure out an opportunity to cash on Google’s mistake(s).

Death of You can’t hurt someone else’s SEO era

If months ago you couldn’t negatively affect someones rankings in the SERPs you can do it now after the latest algorithm adjustment where Google tries to patch those patterns that usually seo professionals use to improve visibility of their own properties or customers websites.

• Too much inbound links in short period of time – Raises a flag!
• Over optimized page – Raises a flag!
• Over optimized link campaign – Raises a flag!
• Too much of same type of links – Raises a flag!
• Inconsistent inbound link bursts – Raises a flag!

We were taught how we need to optimize our websites so search engine spider bots could crawl and know what the topic of our website is. We were told to optimize our websites so it loads faster (yeah, Google bot was getting too busy so didn’t had enough time to spend crawling your site). As time passed algorithm evolved and lead to new rules and methods of optimizing a website and link campaigns. Once any link was better then no links, then that shifted into targeted link from quality sources. We were also told that competition cannot hurt our rankings but with all these new adjustments in the algorithm that recently happened I started to believe that it was no longer that true, those signals were to easy to be misunderstood and that there was no way of knowing if the owner of the site was the one to blame or a competitor was after us.

Through the years of trial and error I learned that almost perfect sauce to optimize a website, avoid any dances in the SERPs and ensure that the site(s) would climb the SERPs gradually day-after-day. Closely monitored and documented everything that I would perform on a site (mine or clients) then compared the before and after each algorithm update, correlated as closely as possible each and every task I would perform with changes based on the new algorithm and adapted to the game, monitored competitors and adapted as well as improved my sites to outrank them. Followed the rules with little twists based on logic and past data to give to users and Google what users and Google needed, but there is a new dangerous player in the game and the fields gates were opened by Google itself.

New bad player in the game – Negative SEO

Throughout all my trials and errors I learned the good and the bad, the effective and negative sides of each and every approach I would/could take. Silly thing is, I was blind enough and focused on the positive things that I simply eliminated and avoided the negative side even tho at times I would ask myself what if I did this to the site that ranked above mine? what would have happened then?

Well someone didn’t hold himself to just asking that question but went further and tested it once, and tested it again and proved that 9 out of 10 times he could indeed hurt its competitors rankings by just sending those “red flag” over-optimization signals to search engines.

Obviously everything is off-site related, you can’t really get access to competitors site and just add a noindex meta to it. So what are the signals that search engines correlate to spammers;

• Forum profile links in large scale in single bursts (talking about 1-10k of such links)
• Links from bad neighborhood and link farms in large scale
• Web2.0 profile links in large scale
• Blog comments from unrelated resources in large scale

As you can see the common part of the above list is 2; cheap and easily achievable links & large scale. This is how spammers used to operate before the algorithm was patched and eliminated / penalized those spammers – far are the days when they would simply discount those links, the shorter road now is not to penalize the site algorithmically or after a manual review.

Especially after this last action taken by Google of deindexing private blog networks, as I said the shorter road now is to penalize the site rather then discount links of certain type, and many SEO’s have notice this and turned this same gun against their competitors. Google Bowling or now known as Negative SEO is nothing new to be honest, but it is even easier to be done today then it was a few weeks ago, but recently negative seo services are popping up like mushrooms and reporting stories of how Joe penalized their competitor with cheap & crap links are increasing daily – worst even, it makes curious other people and they are testing this in large scales. If once SEO firms with deep pockets could risk/afford to play this type of game to get their clients at the top..now even the middle guy can with few hundreds (if he is lazy to do it by him/herself).

Who loses? Welcome Mr. Chaos

You, me, the middle guy & girl that has a small website and tries to generate an extra income online. Definitively such techniques will not work on Fortune 500 websites and properties that are for years now online and have a huge amount of quality links form trusted resources and have gained enough trust from search engines to be penalized with similar tricks.

If you are new in this game and you don’t have the necessary knowledge nor funds nor creativity to survive the risk that tomorrow your site will be buried deep in the SERPs for something that you haven’t done but your competitor did to you is higher.

The game hasn’t changed, only the rules are made tougher

If I was to speculate that Aliens are planing to take over the World someone would call me crazy and I believe they would call me the same if I speculated that Google is just making the rules of the game much harder and less accessible for the middle guy/girl to show off in the first page of the SERPs and make profit out of it while in the same time they are increasing commercial space in their SERPs, giving more exposure & alluring positions to paid advertisers – seo is tough, seo takes time, seo is no guarantee…paid advertisement in the other hand is quick, fast and results are instant..you need to have deep pockets tho.

But I am not even speculating, I am just thinking out loud while chit chatting between me and myself to where this whole thing might be going to.. Feel free to interrupt my rant, say yours bellow.

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