The Oop’s Penalty might also be considered the Google Anti-SEO Update. It’s an *over optimization penalty* so we all just call it the Oop’s penalty.

According to Google:

“In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at web-spam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted web-spam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce web-spam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive web-spam tactics.”

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Notices like this from Google these days don’t seem to carry as much weight as they used to it seems. I mean, come on, an Oop’s Penalty? Really? In the old days, we found Google riding to the rescue of the SERP’s with tools to combat spam, and porn, that showed their own marked improvement over a period of time .. These days? .. What with how totally off the mark Google results have been? .. um .. not so much.

Google has lost much of it’s appeal overall these days as they diversify into other areas, namely advertising. Core product search isn’t really on Google’s dinner table any more.

As far as the announcement mentioned above? Fine. I’ve always maintained that if you put on a finely tuned and developed internet web solution that you wouldn’t have much to worry about with regard to Google and their cluttered algorithm.

When I look around at some of these other, presumed inferior, search engines like Duck Duck Go, Blekko, and a few others, I don’t see all of the game playing. I get the results and go from there. I find it somewhat odd that Google seems to be the only one that has a spam problem. I guess they have to have “the spam” in order to justify paying their engineers to do something … anything.

I’m pretty sure that other search engines have spam problems too, but not a single one of them makes as big a noise about it all as Google. It’s as if every so often Google has to jump up and down screaming, “Look at me, look at me”. I have a 5 year old that does that.

I suppose that, in summation, if Google actually delivered the best results, consistently, I might pay more attention to announcements like this .. but I don’t see myself getting all too overly excited about Google going after a small 12% of those that actually do try to game the system. I’ve got better things to do with my time. The internet is so much bigger than Google and it needs my undivided attention.