Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.

Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

This is a great article. I'd say I buy into this thinking nearly 100%.

Was SEOmoz affected by Google’s Panda Updates? It depends how you look at it. Since the first update hit in February of 2011, organic search traffic to SEOmoz has...

Wow, this is an amazing list.

I find it hard to believe the exact numbers, but ignoring the specific values, in general, it's pretty damning.

Google said its latest algorithm change is so big that users will notice different, higher-quality search results.

Another coverage of this recent update.

Google has penalized Overstock.com in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant's search engine.

Wow, crazy that SEO is so talked about in major news sites lately. Watch out big sites, Google is going after anybody nowadays... make sure you spend a lot of money on PPC, that should help out get back in SERPs pretty quickly :)

Blekko's continued full-frontal assault on Google...

Google has released a Chrome Extension that allows users to block certain website in search results.  Search results have a link that allow you to block a domain.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

What? Google caught JC Penney doing Black Hat SEO/link buying, probably knew for months and did not do anything until it blew out of proportion because of the shopping season... Maybe this can help understand the reason:

Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

But then the story explodes and it's bad for Google's image so they need to do something about it... well, JC Penney reached their year-end goal anyway, made their stockholders happy, so who cares if they lose traffic and earnings by now...

Oh remember the "Nope, there is NO WAY Google can manual change rankings"?

But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3. On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4. By Feb. 10, it was 52.

As well as recently, the Bing/Google story where Google made specific sites show for crazy search terms.

I am sorry, but all this really makes me lose confidence in Google's honesty about search. And in my own experience with the Halloween niche, i have seen cases after cases where websites reached rankings right on for the Halloween season although they used obvious paid link strategies to gain these rankings 8 to 12 months prior...

Google, i think your biggest challenge is going to gain user's, and mostly online marketers, confidence back in your search engine.

Arrington weights in on the search crisis...  Sounds like he's saying that the time is right for a competitor to move in on the flailing google.  This is Google's AltaVista moment.

excerpt:

A decade ago I tried Google for the first time. Like everyone said, it was magic - the result I wanted was right there at the top. For someone who'd been using AltaVista for years before that it was a very pleasant experience. Anyone who was on the Internet before Google came along knows exactly what I'm talking about. Google just felt right. It got the job done. It's been a creeping feeling, growing over the years, but it sort of feels like pre-Google again. Search is a really bad overall experience. Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that. When I'm trying to figure out the best hotel for me when I travel I bail on Google entirely and head to Tripadvisor (shudder), and Gogobot. Same for gadget product reviews. GDGT, Amazon and occasionally Consumer Reports seem to have the best collections of data, so I just go there directly and bypass Google. In fact, I use Google mostly for navigation, not discovery these days. Meaning I know the document I'm trying to find and figure out the best search query to locate it. But pure discovery? It's a shit show of layer upon layer of SEO madness vying for my click.

Google took hard action against J.C. Penny for what appeared to be a poorly thought out SEO scheme.

On one hand, good for Google.

On the other hand, what if a competitor set up these spammy link sites?

Those publishers, which many dismissively refer to as content farms, include Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed. Demand Media uses software that looks at activity on search engines, Facebook and Twitter; generates headlines based on it; and assigns freelancers to write corresponding pieces. The result is articles like “How to Lose Weight in Your Face,” which is a top Google result for related searches and includes tips like “drink plenty of water.” But that approach might not be so effective for long. In recent weeks, there has been swelling criticism in technology circles of these types of Web sites, and of Google for listing the articles as top results.

Must read.

The Washington Post has picked up on the story of quality issues with google. Classic example, "My TV doesn't work!" Searches failed on Google. Succeeded on Twitter.

From Matt Cutts:

“we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content."

(bold is mine) Small change? Maybe, but there are a few very notable things here.

• Google is moving super fast to respond to some of these issues that are getting a bunch of visibility.
• Google is being very transparent about it.
• Most importantly, the source of good content is hopefully going to get credit for their hard work. (and hopefully it isn't just hackernews)

Interesting post, but just as interesting is a comment-sub-thread:

kidmercury:

"niche, niche, niche! it's why twitter is going to fail, why quora is going to fail, why many of these "let's see if we can raise a lot of money and get the whole world to join our system" type of things are going to fail. go niche, connect the niches, voila, problem solved.

also, social disrupts search. but not facebook and twitter style social. like i said, gotta go niche.

niche!"

Jenni Ramirez:

"Niche = small. Small !== $$$"

"depends on you perspective. niche won't generate lots of revenue, but it won't generate lots of cost either. niche sites can be operated by VERY small teams.

also, if you connect the niches, you get something big.

Your model is problematic in fashion blogging. Individual bloggers write about their interest in fashion but Google does not find them individually in search results. It finds the marketing networks that are SEO driven, not content driven, no how to manipulate things like no follow. To illustrates this I searched Google for a discussion I had read about this problem with the search term "shopsense bloggers no follow" - Google found the discussion but a site called zimbio that I have never heard of was listed in Google's results above the blog that originally published the information.

THis is one of the recent posts that created a bit of a tipping point on the scrutiny that Google has been receiving this first month of 2011.

"Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search. We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing)."

Google's Matt Cutts makes an official response to the criticism, discusses a shift in focus from webspam to content farms.

Scathing criticism of content farms and google

"Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads."

"The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers."

Frustration of holiday shopping google searches being rife with spam sites has become an annual event. This post got a ton of attention in the twitterverse.

Great post dissecting how brand search terms are getting completely spammed out. Interesting theory is that this has gotten bad in the past several months partly because of google Caffeine. The spammy sites that rank well don't necessarily last long, but are replaced by more spammy sites, all fueled by forum link spam, hacked sites, etc. -- keyword rich link text on unrelated sites.