The future of SEO?

I think it's clear that google has a goal as a company of being more social, and that is shown with many google properties. I'm posting from my phone right now so I don't have specific links but I've read many times that google is starting to put much more emphasis on social and user behavior to determine how a site should rank.

It's obviously very tough for google to determine which site is more relevant or authoritative than the next using algorithms and math, so it seems as though they basically want to "outsource" determining relevance and authority. They can outsource this to the public by watching how people interact with a site. More page views as a percentage, time on site, social interactions with a site/ brand , ect, will clearly tell google which sites are most relevant in the eyes of the user. I strongly believe that this will become more and more important to google and that they'll start ranking sites accordingly.

Sounds to me like we should all be building bots to replicate site visitors and that socially interact with our sites. Thoughts?

My observations from this update, are that the changes aren't super big. Social signals aren't required in small niches. Nor are they necessarily required at all. But I do think it greatly helps. I will be building up social signals from twitter and facebook from now on. I think the whole "ranking from twitter alone" is BS the vast majority of the time, but it does give your website authority.

I think however, from my observations, most people got bitten in the ass because of anchor link text. Its my websites with poor anchor link distribution that got hit, and in those specific keywords. I also see that recovery from the penalty is totally possible; this isn't a "you had bad links, now you will get a 30-90 day penalty" update IMHO. It seems more like a flat-out algorithim change and that if your website meets its standards it will go back up again.

I think I am going to focus more on social and writing high quality content than building backlinks for a while

Well I agree that we need to learn what works with the new algo and that will certainly involve certain forms of backlink, point is that if a site is on the fence in googles eyes with regards to backlinks that if you have a strong social presence and strong on site visitor metrics then that will likely push you to the good side. Not saying that anyone should focus exclusively on social but it seems like it will be much more important than it was in the past.

Anchor link text could be a big cause of the slap most of us received. When I received my first penalty on Feb 17th (Panda 3.3), this was the general consensus and I vigorously de-optimized my anchor text over a 60-day period and I regained a good portion of my SERPs and increased sales close to pre-penalty levels and then April 24th hit and my SERPs were rocked into oblivion.

Could google have turned up the dial on BLOOP (back link over-optimiztion penalty) again? very possible...

Did google devalue links from sites (2.0s) with spun content? doesn't seem to appear as many people report their 2.0s outranking their own site...

I'm not sure where SEO is going at this point and I felt very similar for about two weeks after Feb 17th. I expect to feel the same for the next 2-3 weeks and hopefully we can figure something out. Maybe the situation will work itself out, but I don't believe google will roll this update back. I want to believe this, but this is not something they have done in the past so this is probably not something they will do in the future.

It is very true that after these major updates, everyone thinks the sky is falling (and it sure as hell does when your SERPs are nowhere to be seen), but in the end google bot is an algorithm and all math equations have solutions. Now its time to find the solution, we have found the solution in the past and there is no reason not to think that we won't find it again, and then the whole dance starts all over between google and us!

Also just want to make clear that I'm not directly relating my hypothesis to the recent updates, but rather to a larger trend that seems to imply social and user behavior (low bounce rates, multiple page views, ect) as more and more important.

No matter what the updates will be but be sure if you ahev much unique content on your site, you will be getting credit for it, so keep writing good content and keep flourishing.