Google is claiming their new update which looks to be both punishing what they consider to be “over optimized” sites and is likely introducing the first phase of their semantic search has only affected about 3% of the total Internet searches.

Well, I can tell you right now that is B.S.

I do not know what the actual percentage of searches affected is but I know it’s HUGE! Almost every single SEO person I know was just devastated by this update including the people I know who focus solely on whitehat SEO.

Matt Cutts of course just annouced that he wants people doing only white hat seo or even “no seo” because he thinks that Google is smart enough to figure everything out on it’s own.

Well Matt, let’s looks at some of your results as said by some of the comments on Google’s blog over this update.

So far today’s search results are worse than they’ve been for the past month. On one search for a keyword phrase there’s a completely unrelated Wikipedia page, a random Twitter account for some company, and a page from an independent search engine from 1997 showing in the top 10 results. Yeah, that’s the kind of quality user experience we want to see. Way to knock it out of the park.

Anyone who’s looking at the results rather than what Google claims will know this did nothing to help webspam. For instance #10 for “make money online” … makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com … I’ve seen countless more examples of minimal content pages ranking now. I guess that’s one way to get around the “over-optimization” filters … just don’t have anything on your site to optimize!

well now more rubbish results appearing in search than before. more exact domain name match results and unrelated websites . Google failed once again.

so many .info, .co unrelated domains ranked for respected queries. are you sure no mistake in this update?

Surely, whatever these updates are doing, they are not right. Here’s just one example. A search for “ereader comparison chart” brings up “ereadercomparisonchart dot com” on 2nd page of results and it goes “Welcome! This domain was recently registered at namecheap.com. The domain owner may currently be creating a great site for..”
While my site which provided true value to its readers is nowhere to be found.
Please fix this.

there is something wrong with this update . search “viagra” on Google.com 3 edu sites are showing in the first page . is it relevant? matt you failed .

Search Google for a competitive term such as “new shoes” — look who’s #1: Interpretive Simulations – NewShoes – (Intro to Marketing, Marketing Principles). All competitive terms have some youtube videos on the top which aren’t of any good quality even. This is not what is expected of google. Please revert.

These are results have to be a complete joke, so much unrelated content is now surfaced to the top it’s sickening.

So far what I have seen from this update is an absolute joke. If they want to reward good content then great. Figure out a freaking way to reward it!

But Google knows it can’t read and judge quality content. That will not likely happen in my lifetime. All they can see is “content” and whether or not it is “unique”. They may have developed a general grammar check which looks at something like noun/verb relationships so they can make sure the content isn’t just a bunch of random words, but that is their absolutely best case scenerio.

So either Google has fallen into the trap of believing it’s own ego or they were so out of touch with the real world they didn’t realize that the people who cared the most about their websites and their content, also did what SEO had to be done to get ranked next to their competitors.

That means they have just kicked out an astronomical percentage of websites with great content, and now what we are seeing is almost all authority e-commerce sites and garbage spam sites at the top.

Google’s pension for damaging how it makes money might have just put the final nail in the coffin. If these results don’t improve and improve significantly, people are going to start flocking to Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.

Seeing that Google just killed the businesses of about 50% of their income revenue (websites with adsense) they can’t afford to lose much in the way of search engine traffic too.

As it stands, Google has been losing more money each year for the last 3 years or so now. Being that they are a billion dollar company it never hit them too hard. But investors have been pulling out little by little and now I think some massive changes will be coming in the next quarter or two as the executive team reigns in control over their Webspam team and self proclaimed “Distinguished Engineer”.

UPDATE

This was the example Google gave on it’s blog about what it’s new search update will fix.

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Got thoughts? Let me hear em!!!