3 ms·

Thought 1: This may be overly cynical, but it is hard to believe that this isn't just another way to dump more people into their adwords system. People who "ov

Thought 1: This may be overly cynical, but it is hard to believe that this isn't just another way to dump more people into their adwords system. People who "over optimize" on a large scale are probably the same people making money off of well ranked SERP's, penalizing those people pushes them to buy adwords. They are in essence pre-qualified customers for adwords since they have already demonstrated a willingness to invest real time/money in ranking. Sure this will just trigger yet another race to optimize optimization, but until things are refigured out more money will be dumped into adwords. Thought 2: This SERP "Market Volatility" is a great way for Google and SEO's to make a little more money. This is also a good way of reminding some people how much their revenue is dependent on Google, when you see an overnight dive in revenue it captures the attention/mind share of higher ups who have maybe been taking their well oiled SERP machine for granted. It's like a one night only "Google Dance" reunion tour, and gets people obsessing over them again.

andybak 15y ago
That sounds like a marvelous future. Everyone who can justify throwing money at the problem can use paid search and everyone left in organic search can wish them all good riddance and get on with producing content.
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  except this makes sites like StackOverFlow, Huffington Post, Mashable, Yelp, and most sites that depend on advertising economically unsustainable. Before you say "No..", remember even Yelp, a great word-of-mouth resource gets over 70% of their visits through search engines. As does Stack Overflow. What will be left will be personal bloggers, charities, and hobbyist sites. Be careful what you wish for.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    HuffPo is a spam site that Panda should have killed. Stackoverflow is a unique content sites with practically no human-unfriendly SEO (Except maybe the huge list of related questions that tends to fool Google, where the search term is split over two questions and neither is actually relevant. )

andybak 15y ago

That sounds like a marvelous future. Everyone who can justify throwing money at the problem can use paid search and everyone left in organic search can wish them all good riddance and get on with producing content.

AznHisoka 15y ago
except this makes sites like StackOverFlow, Huffington Post, Mashable, Yelp, and most sites that depend on advertising economically unsustainable. Before you say "No..", remember even Yelp, a great word-of-mouth resource gets over 70% of their visits through search engines. As does Stack Overflow. What will be left will be personal bloggers, charities, and hobbyist sites. Be careful what you wish for.
- Drbble 15y ago
  HuffPo is a spam site that Panda should have killed. Stackoverflow is a unique content sites with practically no human-unfriendly SEO (Except maybe the huge list of related questions that tends to fool Google, where the search term is split over two questions and neither is actually relevant. )