Who will suffer in the near to medium term?
Affiliate sites / domain clusters / MLM programs running on same servers.
Sites relying heavily on ‘on-page’ site optimization factors.
Sites that rely on highly competitive search terms to get traffic.
Recommendations for site owners
They need to think out-of-the-box and seriously consider improving PageRank and links from ‘Expert Documents’ as distinct promotional campaigns. The rules of ranking have changed significantly
Get listing in as many major directories (DMOZ, Yahoo, About, LookSmart etc.), trade directories, yellow pages, associations, resource pages, highly classified sections pages etc.
Avoid domain clusters / affiliate programs or change nature of affiliate programs.
Avoid reciprocal links from suspect FFA sites and link farms
Popular Myths: Good site optimization will continue to support rankings to the extent of its weigh
Over-optimization is now being penalized: Over-optimization (spam) has always been either discounted or penalized. The current impact of rank loss is seen due to shift of weight from on-page to off-page factors. Good site optimization will continue to support rankings to the extent of its weight in the algo.
Link building is no longer important: Link-popularity building is as important as before, perhaps even more important now. The PR algo continues to gain importance.
Google is using a ‘money words’ filter list: As you can see from above arguments, Google is not using any filter list to penalize commercial sites. The results just ‘seem’ to be indicating such symptoms. Nor has Google implemented this algo for the sake of pushing their AdWords or building their bottom-line for the forthcoming IPO
Listing in DMOZ, Google directory, commercial directories gives Google the clue that your site is commercial and therefore penalizes it: On the contrary, since most of these directories ‘qualify’ to be the ‘expert documents’, links from these sites are of great value.
