Over Optimization Penalty Launched Today

exactly, it appears actual whitehat methods are being targeted in this iteration
my first seo campaign ever was page 1 from 2009 until two days ago for it's terms
hadn't done any work on it since that jerk stiffed me for over 2k
(i'm kinda happy to see him tank like this)
the whole link profile for the site is this
1. a prnewswire press release
2. a prweb press release
3. a completely unique content article that was posted at goarticles (it got redirected though when he stiffed me)
4. a series of blogs, with manually rewritten content, niche specific and stuff that wasn't written about anywhere else (he was an ophthalmologist so it was easy to get info that hadn't been done over and over again in his area in the article directories)
it was 20 blogs in all
the only thing even close to blackhat about the campaign was the blog interlinking, it was still pretty primitive
just a simple star pattern, each blog links to two others, but never to one that linked to it
these were linked to eachother from 2 spots on the star to each other star
his entire network is down in page 4-7 territory now

so i can definitely confirm it's blogroll links doing people in now
(either that or they're just fukin nuts)

or...he could have gotten someone else to do some seo for him and i don't know about it
but it definitely jibes with the results i've seen from other campaigns

i just hope i got to the rest of my network in time

edit:
wait....one other common factor between the two
they both have web 2.0s linking to them, hubpages and wordpress.com
but i never ran any comment campaign to those

@IamNRE : Whay you used there to check your rankings?

I do agree with the sentiment that those who haven't been penalized and think they have done something "right" are "whistling past the graveyard".

I have had some sites penalized, some sites not, and they are built in the same way. It seems to be a matter of LUCK more than anything. Because G has fucked everything up it's like a machine gun spraying out bullets everywhere and you're just lucky if you don't get hit in the crossfire.

My EMD went from #1 to now on Page 2.

What's the best course of action of us to take? Should we continue building backlinks, add more content? Jump off a bridge? Burn down Google's corporate office?

The interesting thing about the keywords I was ranking for are the websites that are up there now are not domains, but subpages or articles on domains.

monk13 said:

so i can definitely confirm it's blogroll links doing people in now
(either that or they're just fukin nuts)

or...he could have gotten someone else to do some seo for him and i don't know about it
but it definitely jibes with the results i've seen from other campaigns

i just hope i got to the rest of my network in time

edit:
wait....one other common factor between the two
they both have web 2.0s linking to them, hubpages and wordpress.com
but i never ran any comment campaign to those

Click to expand...

I can tell you its not blogroll links. I have had 1 site of mine affected drasticlly but it was and is my most WH site, no blogroll, people actually link to it on their own etc..has unique content not only from me personally but from experts in the field (1 US Olympic team member, 1 the youngest NCAA champ for his sport in history) and it took a huge dive. In addition I have a site on MY blogroll of the same site and it is sitting firm on page 1. I have thousands of indexed pages on the site according to TT. In other words, this looks pretty damn random.

Getwhatchuwant said:

... This algo has no rhyme or reason ...

Click to expand...

^And that's spot on.

Only a bunch of myopic engineers can come up with what Google is doing right now and have the sack to announce it to the world as an improvement.

Unintended consequenses can often be funny things. But, what tears one between anger and laughter about Google is that we are now - by and large - seeing the sheer magnitude of off-site SEO being performed on the web: Google is obviously at war with off-site SEO, and penalizing sites regardless of their quality, thereby bringing bullshit to page 1. That Google could not forsee this happening is just precious - fodder for comics, really.

If anything, these updates just serve to enforce the fact that SEOs know better than Google what does and does not constitute 'quality'.

And all of this, setting aside the utterly inexplicable collateral damage, (such as my 2 sites).

BLIXX said:

^And that's spot on.

Only a bunch of myopic engineers can come up with what Google is doing right now and have the sack to announce it to the world as an improvement.

Unintended consequenses can often be funny things. But, what tears one between anger and laughter about Google is that we are now - by and large - seeing the sheer magnitude of off-site SEO being performed on the web: Google is obviously at war with off-site SEO, and penalizing sites regardless of their quality, thereby bringing bullshit to page 1. That Google could not forsee this happening is just precious - fodder for comics, really.

If anything, these updates just serve to enforce the fact that SEOs know better than Google what does and does not constitute 'quality'.

And all of this, setting aside the utterly inexplicable collateral damage, (such as my 2 sites).

Click to expand...

Truth! And consequences are dire indeed, I think google generated 32 billion in revenue last year, for the sake of comparison if they went off the grid like we have that would cost them 9 million per day!

Spaznik said:

Nice, as soon as I start studying all I find about SEO, now Google changes the rules...

Click to expand...

welcome to the world of SEO.

Anyone getting signs of people switching to Bing?

I really wonder where does this Matt guy lives. It is not always true that webmasters who is doing link building has spam content.

ComputerEngineer said:

I really wonder where does this Matt guy lives. It is not always true that webmasters who is doing link building has spam content.

Click to expand...

That is exactly what I said in my other thread. Why do they equate link building with spam, garbage content? Does link building automatically render sites useless to visitors? In what way is it worse than a site with no linkbuilding done at all?

Getwhatchuwant said:

I can tell you its not blogroll links. I have had 1 site of mine affected drasticlly but it was and is my most WH site, no blogroll, people actually link to it on their own etc..has unique content not only from me personally but from experts in the field (1 US Olympic team member, 1 the youngest NCAA champ for his sport in history) and it took a huge dive. In addition I have a site on MY blogroll of the same site and it is sitting firm on page 1. I have thousands of indexed pages on the site according to TT. In other words, this looks pretty damn random.

Click to expand...

if that's the case it looks like they're penalizing whitehat sites exclusively then, the only even slightly blackhat things done to the two sites i had dip were blogroll
all my other stuff is sitting pretty
in fact, the stuff i've done more recently, with wikis,articles,web2.0s comments ,bookmarks etc, still ranks great
(one of the sites that tanked, the one i care about, it had 0 bh backlinks except the blogrolls from 10 blackhatted authority sites)


that just tells me, i should go spam the crap outta the site i want to rank

I think what we can do is just wait. When we see a blogspot with no content,no seo, no jack shit is ranking for a term like "make money online" we have to understand that there is absolutely nothing we can do at this point. Do not believe those who have said that their "seo technique is solid"and has evaded this BS update as they may get hit sooner or later.

If we get sites back to top google will make update again. Then everything starts again and goes on and on. Neverending battle!

So F@@K google. SEO isnt stable anymore need something else insted

Yes, I have a site I haven't touched in a year. It hasn't showed up in the top 100 in over a year. It just showed up #3 spot ... And it's for a pretty competitive industry.

Now if only I would get some sales from it... Ugh.

Statix said:

This is also bringing a lot of older sites that haven't been updated in a while up in the rankings

Click to expand...

Happening to .co.uk as well

One of my main keywords has dropped from #13 to #413 on g.co.uk and from #22 to nowhere on g.com

...I also wanted to comment to those thinking that what we are seeing won't stick, that Google shall surely rectify, and that this is an algorithmic dance.

False.

I say this primarily because what we saw after Panda 3.3/3.4 stuck solid, with little to no change across all verticals.

I keep a retarded amount of objectively garnered data about such things, and there was less than 3% change on what I tracked after 30 days.

Short of manual review occurring because of a bombardment of e-bitching, what we see right now is what the Internet will look like for some time; until the next major algorithmic roll-out, that is, which is likely to target anyone, anywhere, in any way (theoretically) reliant upon organic search to make money.

I can't emphasize it enough: Stop relying on Google organic search for making money. There is no future in it.

Interesting isn't it that G bothered to make up their own nonsense spam page that nobody else is likely to seriously use; just to show us how they're watching the use of these products and are laser targeting them and their users.

Well I suppose it gives them something to do to draw attention away from their own crap thieving business ethics.... Maybe if they wrote some versus they write something like:

'Thou shalt not copy things.. But we Shall.
Thou shall not steal... But we Will.
Thou shall not Cloak and dagger... But we Do.
Thou shall not use automated bots... For we are the Bot Masters.
Thou shall have privacy statements... And we shall break apart all privacy.
Thou shall not Own anything... Because we want it ALL...
Thou shall trust us alot... But we Lie and change our minds...'

Good Luck Oracle... Hope you Win a Bundle!!!!

I think these new changes is not affecting google france yet, my customers are still on first page