BaseballGuy - 7:50 pm on Apr 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

So some people are appear to be saying that all their sites have been hit. What is the consensus here? Is G downgrading a Webmaster and all his work, or is it that all the sites of a particular webmaster have something in common.

From my point of view....it's either one of two things:

Matt Cutts and his team are geniuses and have finally figured out a way to combat SPAM on the internet. This update had a ton of collateral damage and he will be fixing it in the coming weeks and/or months.

or

Matt Cutts and his team have over-engineered the Google algorithm and this cluster-f@*$ of an update will solve nothing. Thousands of honest webmasters who were only trying to follow the rules will get dinged......and yes, some spammers will, however the spammers will come right back with a new set of tricks, once they figure out how to take advantage of the new loopholes created by the algorithm.

Meanwhile, thousands of honest webmasters will still pay the price and never get their rankings back.....thereby creating a void in the search results that will be filled with even more spammy looking sites.

I think Cutts and Co. unfairly targeted sites with affiliate links and made "catch-all" filters for sites that do have affiliate links, regardless of whether they were spam or not.

Just my .02


Meanwhile, (and I'm not going to "out" anyone) but one website I know has continued to rank #1 for a medium competition (organic) keyword, despite all of Panda's best efforts.

"Build your site for your visitors" is a crock of #*$! for this particular query, as he is merely promoting an affiliate program. His entire backlink profile consists of paid links, multiple aged domains that he most likely purchased (totally non-relevant) and a few other tricks which I won't disseminate due to the fact I might have to follow suit.


This whole "build your site for your visitors" is a crock of b.s. We build our sites for the Google algorithm and whatever they seem to think is "right".

For you see, many many many honest webmasters got dinged by this update on April 24th 2012. They were "following the rules" and look where it got them.


This update has taught me a very valuable lesson: Don't listen to the propaganda coming out of Cutts mouth. Instead, pay attention to the sites who continually survive draconian algorithm update after update.....then copy what they are doing.


Here's your quality site, Cutts. Exactly as the algorithm you engineered wants it to look/feel like. Screw the visitor.