steerpikegg - 11:09 am on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

As far as I can tell, all that this update would appear to do is encourage paid or spammy links to deep pages especially for e-commerce sites. After all, who is going to naturally link to or write a review on a product page for something like say a paperclip or a lightbulb?

Does this mean the end of e-commerce websites for anybody other than the big boys ?

It seems to me like it is time for Google to take some responsibility for it's monpoly like status with regards to search and realise what kind of impact a change like this will have on the economies of independant retailers (particluarly those with limited markup or margins ie with small budgets for adwords that can't compete with big organisations) who have relied on the relative uniqueness of products via long tail searches to eke out a living.

I believe that it's almost at a stage now where Google could bring down a whole country's economy if it implemented the right (or wrong depending how you look at it) kind of algo change.