Lenny2 - 12:10 am on Feb 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

Below you will find Google's announcement re-written with some soul. This took me 10 minutes. There are a lot more missing points that a more professional PR person would probably catch onto. I purposely did not change much. I wanted to show people how little needed to be said to say SO MUCH.

The essential difference between this rendition and their rendition is that Google treats these changes as if they are at war with the content in their search engines. It's almost as if they are coming from behind and trying to stomp out the people that are "screwing" them. The reality of the situation is that sure there are a lot of black-hat seo crap going on.. but, how can Google for as big and successful a company as it is, be so completely compassion-less? They treated this event and the algo change and their "press release" as if they had been getting screwed by sites and they finally were able to stamp them out. I mean really Google? really? Have you been screwed for years? seems to me like you have market share because you have a pretty damn great search engine... And if you have to make an Algo change it is because you are trying to make it BETTER! And if people/sites are going to suffer, well shouldn't you thank them for their service to your search engine for years? Not, treat them as if they were not the reason you have maintained public favor?

Here was their "press release" almost 24 hours AFTER THE CHANGE, quoted parts are mine:

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

In a lot of ways we are completely dependent on the brilliant webmasters and web entrepreneurs who have made up our search results, without them our business would be very limited. As aforementioned every time we make changes to our algorithm some sites go up and some sites go down; it is the natural side affect to a healthy web eco-system. In the change that we have recently launched a lot of sites that have been displayed prominently in our search results for years may see a decrease in rankings. Google has nothing but gratitude for the years that, those sites have been there for our mutual customers. And it should be noted that we do hope that those negatively affected by this change are able to climb their way back up the search results, naturally.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

For sites that are negatively affected please submit your site to this link: google.com/cares