Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings, they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of that.<p>It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!
This negative SEO is <i>huge</i> problem now and I'm concern about it.<p>What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted...<p>I hope this is going to be fixed somehow.<p>EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" or real problem?
I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links.<p>As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics, etc.
Nothing too interesting IMO except the increased advertorial crackdown, although I'm skeptical as to how much of that they'll be able to detect. (Ironically, I'm seeing more & more of these in A/B level tech blogs)
If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS.<p>If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.
Im glad to see the clustering is being looked into, there is nothing worse than searching for something and seeing 15 links in a row from the same domain ( like tripadvisor or other large content heavy sites).
Skip to the 3 minute mark.<p>The problem with these spam signals, like comment SPAM, it's very hard to know if they are from the target of the links, or from some other person trying to damage your reputation online and hoping you get penalised. Google doesn't see the IPs / email addresses that submit these comments. So it's impossible to know if they are legitimate or not when it comes to who has created them.
I hope SEO can be expected to go extinct in the coming whatever and be replaced with "good content" approach. It is unfortunate that Google even addresses the shady SEO community boosting their might and glory.
Hacked sites are a dominant strategy is many markets right now. Perp will Hack N sites, cloak them so only the googlebot sees the hacks, and use those links to drive rankings of a site in a highly liquid market place (Pharma, gambling, payday, insurance).<p>When google can't devalue hacked/cloaked links well, I expect much collateral damage with Penguin (since it has primarily been focused on low value links). It won't be a precision attack on webspam.
Not to be too dramatic about this, but I basically feel that the moment it became possible to negative SEO a competitor for ~$5 via services like fiverr et al is the moment that will be remembered as the end of Google as a dominant search engine, or at least the end of a Pagerank-centric algorithm for its search.