Only as good as your cheapest link

Goggle did what?!  With the launch of Google's new Panda platform, for rating websites', its causing a ruckus for webmasters.  An article from Tech Crunch, suggests Google is not being bias in Panda's algorithm.  The article goes on further to say, You Tube is excelling; while Hubpages has suffered in ranking because of their open format for post's, sharing, etc. .

From an SEO perspective, the way Hubpages is set up, is exactly what attracts low quality linking.  Those who use Google tools to research your key words allready know, how many people are searching for backlinks, and the competition for the bids on variance's of that.  I'm not saying that I wouldn't write an article on their page; but for the lazy or novice, its enticing to throw a quick mumbo jumbo with a link to your site and be done.  It's spammy, cheap, un-usefull to those searching for a real answer and is probably exactly why they were penalized.

This is a good thing, if your working ethically hard to create website traffic; black hat seo just got a black eye, and its up to you now to watch where your posting backlinks.  Theres a great article on Search Engine Watch, covering this topic.   Matt Cutts is one of the engineers who created Panda, he's in a Q&A with Wired.com  and other developer Singhal. Matt mentions that one day an open source algorithm will exist that will not be gamed by the spammers.  For now, their keeping the current algorithm a secret, to keep the spammers from re-growing like a fungus throughout the web. The search engines have been getting some transparency pressure due to the push for net neutrality.  Last I checked, America is still the land of the free; whats stopping them from creating their own search engine and using there concept there?  Then again, that would probobly equal more tax dollars spent wasted on something the private sector is allready managing.  It was all the earmarks and government control or kickbacks that caused the shady lending practices, which led to the finanial collapse.   For now, since the Republicans took control over the House of Representatives, we're safe from fearing the other aspects of net neutrality. Just to think about the possibility of government control, over content, reminds me of the book Ferenheit 451.  

Googles'  getting better all the time, like for instance the feature where its a quick view of page, like a snipett before clicking on page link.  Then theres plus one, this could be an entirely new way of marketing all together; well the obvious and then encentives for action.  Hopefully without autogenerated responses of spam, like Facebook has with the IQ test that has your friends faces on them.  Plus one is a social response to searches, if your friends like the link, then you'll see a plus one on your search results.