Much gnashing of teeth and hair pulling over the last week as people realised that Google the great god of internet traffic had deliberately slowed down their crawling (reviewing pages for inclusion in search results) and indexing (actually adding those pages to the search results index). Oddly enough, the group that are making the most noise are the very same group that have been abusing the system.
So why has this happened you may be wondering?
Google are in my mind doing EXACTLY what they should do with a tool that has been abused by poor SEO’s.
Sadly their abuse has killed it for everyone else, but they may well now pay a heavy price for the abuse.
I have always warned to tread carefully, because If I were a search algorithm engineer (Which I am 🙂 ) , I would be sandboxing all indexation requests, and running a sub algorithm on them to try and identify potentially spammy submissions.
Once I had that list filtered, I would then run a secondary algorithm against any questionable domains that was more intense and included elements of the main algorithm.
1. sites owned by individuals/companies that are abusing the algorithm.
2. Sites that used by those individuals/companies to abuse.
Armed with this, I would seriously devalue (if not totally block) and page rank value passing from the sites used as a tool to abuse the system, and then penalise all the sites of the individuals/companies who were doing the abusing.