Google plays Russian Roulette with Panda 3.4

For a while now, Google Panda has been running around. Matt Cutts said they where going to "take down" the over optimized backlink networks.

They sure did a good job. Lots of people received notifications in their Google Webmaster tools saying that had "unnatural backlinking" and their sites where to be de-indexed.

Not just a few guys either. It turns out, if you did any unnatural backlinking for the last couple years you might be in jeopardy. If you didn't do any unnatural backlinking at all, you might be in jeopardy. If someone builds backlinks unnaturally to your site, you also, might be in jeopardy.

So what is the solution?

Some personal favorite suggestions I've seen the last few days include things like:

Remove Google Analytics from your site.
Remove Google Webmaster Tools as well.
Do not submit for reconsideration
Do not remove your unnatural backlinks, if you even have control
Keep building backlinks
Vary your anchor text - and only use keywords for 20%-30% (or less) of your backlink anchor text
Diversify your keywords and backlinks more

Consider optimizing for Bing instead of Google
Check out entity based search




For a couple years now I have been thinking, "man, there sure are allot of people who make their living based on how Google sees them. Google has all this control over our sites and is embedded with all these great tools we don't think we can live without, what if they decide to do something small that imposes great economic pain on enough people, will that finally spark their down fall?"

What Google has effectively done is at least stirred the beehive here with this latest update. When the black hats are all abuzz with solutions like "rip out all Google tracking" and use alternatives, now there is a new movement starting that Google won't be able to stop.

It also is important to realize that backlinking still works, Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and a small change that affects 1% of people still affects millions. Ultimately, what changes they do make tend to truly improve search experiences, however, their "acceptable use policy" of the web is almost a manifesto for how they would impose order upon the internet.

The question is, when they shake up peoples livelihoods in a big way, will they be able to weather the reaction or will they spark a revolt that will ultimately dilute their idea of perfect tasting water.

This story isn't done shaping up yet, but it is getting really interesting to watch.