[nulluk]

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.

If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

[AznHisoka]

There was a lot of collateral damage done to innocent sites during both Panda and Penguin. I think there's good reason for everybody who relies on Google traffic to worry a bit.

[distantparts]

My main site was part of the collateral damage from Panda, so I'm pleased to hear Matt say that they're still tweaking Panda to help sites that are still being affected.

My site is pretty much all user generated content (car reviews), and Panda seems to struggle with differentiating such sites from content farms, unless they're part of a larger, established brand.

Almost two years of attempting to fix the problem by improving quality and layouts, reducing ads etc had no effect. Then I raised my case on Google's own forums, resulting in a lot of attention, and a few weeks later I saw a massive improvement (I know, correlation is not causation). Unfortunately I seem to have been hit again last week, by something that looks suspiciously like Panda (though I'm not 100% sure).

I've mostly moved on (now working on an iOS app), but it did appear from the outside that Google was comfortable with the impact of Panda, and it's good to know that they're still focussed on improving it.

[nulluk]

I understand it's all algorithmic and there will be some truly innocent collateral damage involved but Google wouldn't be pushing this out if they didn't feel the overall quality of search would increase.

Most of the collateral damage is going to be people straddling the grey hat line and rightly so in my own opinion.

[jaredmck]

I think it's very possible that google would push this out without thinking the quality of search would increase; if they think their PR will be able to continue controlling the message and getting discussion away from the potentially decreased search quality and fighting any possible damage to the brand through extremely tight & multi-layered propaganda around any dissent or competition that comes up in the news cycle.

Glass fans should be happy to know that shortly after the algo change they should be seeing another wave of public demonstrations, perhaps a self-driving car sighting or two.

[AznHisoka]

I don't disagree, but look at it from the perspective of the small business owner that gets 80% of their revenue from Google traffic. Even if they were one of the few unlucky ones, their livelihood is lost.

[PavlovsCat]

Look at it from the perspective of the small business owner who currently has next to no revenue from Google traffic, because their genuinely useful or relevant site is drowned out by spam.

[OGinparadise]

That makes sense, if virtually every update didn't promote the likes of Amazon, eBay, and Google properties. Small businesses are toast and getting toaster by the update

[Uchikoma]

Right? Not enough keywords and you just don't rank, too many bold keywords and you're hit. Nowadays you get a penalty far before you do anything black hat (Though Penguin should not be about onpage).

[nulluk]

Keyword stuff is abusive, bolding all your keywords should rightly get you penalised. It's not far off the old days of stuffing the defunct meta keywords tag.

First point on googles webmaster guidelines says it all. Your chasing google, build a site for your users first, google will follow because it's in there interest to provide the most relevant content.

  Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
  A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee.
  Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?

[Uchikoma]

What is abusive? With 1 keyword on the page you will not rank. You at least need it in the body, text, url and h1. Is this abusive?

Google tells you to design for the user. This assumes that Google is just as clever as people - what they love to tell you - but which it isn't. That's the main reason people put text blurbs everywhere, create landing pages, put synonyms and different keywords on their pages, because Google is not clever enough.

And your competition just ranks. If you design your pages for users you don't rank from my experience - e.g. people do not care about URLs, do not care about H1 tags on ecommerce pages, don't care about bold, don't care about explanations on ecommerce sites what a t-shirt is or what trousers are . But Google does.

Most of the current high ranking pages, SCREAM "I've been designed for Google!" right into your face.

see exhibit A: http://www.zalando.de/damenschuhe-pumps/

The text on the page to the bottom and to the left clearly isn't for users.

If you have examples of your SEO work where you rank for keywords and have designed your pages for users and not designed the pages for Google I'd be very interested to learn from you - as would /r/seo.

[swinnipeg]

Penguin opened the world to scalable negative SEO. This is now a common tactic in competitive markets. If you rank well it is worth worrying about.

[nulluk]

I can't deny negative SEO is a worry and yes whilst Google opened up the doors for it they also recognised it and have started providing ways to hopefully protect yourself. (Disavowing links etc)

If your in a competitive market where you have to worry about negative SEO so much so that it is making an impact on your SERPs then I'm sure the web spam team would be more than interested in hearing from you

[SteveGerencser]

The largest problem with Disavow is that it doesn't scale as quickly as negative SEO does. You can't possibly build a legit disavow list, contacting every website, documenting effort, not to mention that Google doesn't even show you all the links, when $5 at Fiverr can toss 20k forum links at a site.

[arbuge]

So how do you disavow thousands of links a day? That's what a negative SEO could buy for a few bucks on fiverr...

[OGinparadise]

You are naive, even if disavow works, Google runs this update every six months are so. Do you realize what a traffic drop does to a business with payroll to meet?

[nulluk]

Yes probably I am, because we are talking millions of sites and statisticly your going to get anomolies. Then again if your business model is based primarily on your SERPs then you have a bad business model and should be doing everything you can to mitigate that risk.

It's one of the risks you take which should of been identified if your a competent business owner that wants to survive.

[OGinparadise]

Your post has nothing to do with the previous message or point, you're just switching arguments. Most e-commerce businesses cannot scale /downscale every 50% + or - organic search traffic changes.

[nulluk]

Apologies your right. Trying to bring it back around to my original point by rephraseing my orgional statement then.

If your worried about this update then you haven't been doing seo right and If your relying solely on a 3rd party for the existence or profitability of your company then you have bigger issue at hand than just your seo.