That’s link building for you! Google are constantly trying to hide what their doing with inbound links (and there’s a good reason for that!), I see it every time I link build. It just shows the very close relation to links and getting ranked in Google.

Google don’t have a personal vendeta against anyone – we all play on a level playing field in that to Google we’re just a site. Maybe a good site they love, maybe a bad site they don’t particularly like, but still a site.

Ultimately Google is a search engine it’s not a company and it’s not peoplen. It’s a massive network of computers that run’s on an algorithm – maths to you and me, a very complicated formula but it’s a formula none the less!

If Google has suddenly decided it doesnt like your site so much anymore then there has to be a reason (in the formula) for that.

I enjoy posting here, it’s one of the few blogs that I really have a good look round on and find multiple topics worth a few minutes to contribute to. I don’t consider it to be any part of my SEO activities…however…

Just did my round robin of checking a few stats, factoids and figures and low and behold YackYack is screwing up one of my sites SEO! Brilliant! Actually that’s a compliment to you Rob. In my Webmastertools, “What Google Sees”, YackYack is all over it like a rash showing how well your blog is indexed. Only trouble is I didn’t use relevant anchor text on my initial post as I didn’t expect to be back here so often. Dooh! Any chance of a little tweak of your MSQL? Now that’s an offer I bet you’ve never had before!

Anyway, either I shall have to go cold turkey on YackYack or I will have to turn into a “DoFollow with anchour text” whore after the next 100 day rollover.

Oh yes and it has no artificial links, no directory listings, no article exchanges, no reciprocal links, no key word stuffing, no hidden text, no mod re-writing.

I does have organically grown content, super relevancy and even backlinks from Google it’s self! Your turn will come.

Google sometimes just plain screws up or screws you up because it has one priority only, REVENUE. as a publically listed company it can only ever now report rising earnings, profits, revenue per share, revenue per empoyee, roi whatever you want to quote, they all gotta go up. Your business and my business don’t count one jot to Google, they are completely neutral to our fortunes. Being a good SEO’er or not being a naughty boys doesn’t come into it. It’s the numbers that count. If a tactic pushes up your numbers ride it for all it’s worth because that puts cash in your pocket.

Being compliant to Google’s whim won’t protect you from chance and being wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Should be noted you can always get away with a bit of spammy link building, it’s built into the algo for negative seo reasons.

Our attitude at the company I work for is to look at the Google algo as a friendly guide not a brick wall to get around. Any search engine algo has between 6 to a dozen key concepts in it, depending on the engine and who you’ll talk to. For me you can blow any black hatter out of the water by doing the keyt things – by doing the key things successfully you’ll always get far better results in doing what Google are looking for rather than cheating your way around the system.

Black hat will only get worse, which means the complaining will get worse and in my mind Google will get worse.

i don’t think Google changes it’s algo that much just tweeks it, the big changes in recent history is dealing with spam in whatever guise that may come across, wether it be spamdexing, keyword stuffing your alt tags or just getting nasty links of spam farms.