What’s Happening To Google Rankings? The Summer of Pain

Back on May 13^th, Google’s de facto face of SEO pain, Matt Cutts announced that, and I am paraphrasing, by the end of the summer spammers will be having a bad time.

Google rankings welcome to a new world.

After what has only been just over a month. Webmaster all over the world have found themselves face to face with the ‘Matt Cutts Gang’ or MCG for short.

This team of rogue engineers has rolled out algorithm change after algorithm change to ensure that they catch and demote spammers and unfortunately good wholesome Webmaster too.

After the video was released much speculation swirled as Webmasters and SEOs attempted to interrupt what was said in the video. What was for certain was that it was going to be a rough summer. And rough it has been!

May 22^nd

Brought with it the launch of Google’s Penguin 2.0 the bigger better version, in Matt Cutts opinion. It’s the Penguins first update since October of 2012. This change targeted similar techniques as the previous Penguin: heavy anchor text, and low-quality site links. While the hype was great the overall reaction was less shocking than the original.

June 11^th

Was that day that Matt released an update to target notoriously spammy niches. There was far less reaction from the community as a whole because this action targeted a very specific vertical that was dominated by “Black Hat” SEO’s.

Within the course of 6 weeks. Google took such a strong stance against tactics they deemed to be spammy and manipulating the search results. There are still 8 more weeks until the end of summer. We can only wait and watch what Google and Matt Cutts do. But don’t worry. Stick with nvision to keep up-to-date on what Google is up to next.