martinibuster - 10:05 am on Apr 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

Another round of Google tweaks, including some to catch link manipulators. Are these tweaks focused on the obvious low hanging fruit? Or will this snare borderline tactics?/

Google post here
[insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

The coming update includes spam fighting tweaks. One example [4.bp.blogspot.com]is of a spun page with irrelevant links within it. That might help combat Negative SEO.

The total tweaks (of which links are part of a larger whole) affect a small percentage of total queries:

For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice.

This is going to affect link manipulators who have been targeting in more heavily spammed languages:

...the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.