Google engineers and SEOers will always be in conflicts. But they all need each other like police needs criminals then they have the reason to exist. When SEO gets too much, google will take something back.

That’s the game of SEO. Despite the unfairness, people can’t really do much apart from doing what has been deemed as the “best practice” – create quality content, white hat backlinking with proper anchor text profile, etc…

Though I am still into SEO, but I have moved away SEO as my strategy to bring in traffic for all my new sites / projects as it is just too risky…

Cheers,
Ming

Now let’s get back to your contention: “Google’s goal is to provide searchers with what will be most useful to them. ”

That’s clearly not true. It may be their stated goal. And it probably SHOULD be their goal.

If it were Google’s goal to provide searchers with helpful, high-quality results…they wouldn’t be BURYING top-quality sites with “over-optimization” penalties. To try to justify the impact of such actions on the search rankings borders on insanity.

And keep this in mind: GOOGLE created the situation as it stands today. They started with a good idea (references equal endorsements) and ended up bowing at the altar of a grand algorithm…the lazy man’s way out. I’m certain that Matt Cutts and friends work very hard…but WHATEVER is causing the crap results (whether it’s lack of unimpeachable human input, a lack of ability to acquire the social signals of a billion people on FB, or whatever else you might want to cite as contributing factors), they are FAILING.

To put flesh on my point, let me offer a single personal example (admittedly, a severe one, but I could offer several that are quite dramatic): For 5 years or so, one of my web sites was ranked #1 in its space. This is a legit, high-value site that offers things that real people really want, and for many years, drew 2000-3000 uniques per day.

Before I go on…yes, I built cheap links. Everyone else was doing it, and I couldn’t ignore that. The competition (by the way…Disney, PBS and other titans) were competing for my top ranking. But as of March 2nd of this year, the site was still ranked at #4. By the time the algo update hit in late April, it was still hanging in there at #7. And was still at #14 even as late as the day before this latest update. By September 29th, it had dropped to #264. On October 1st, #336. As of today, it’s at #267.

Mind you…NOTHING has changed on this site during this time. NOTHING. It’s still just as valuable to its visitors…but now, no one sees it.

I’d love to hear you explain how the searching audience is well-served by such search results. Because…it’s impossible to do so. And Matt Cutts couldn’t justify it, either.

Oh, and by the way…after God knows how many years…Bing still has it at #1.

I understand the need to fight spam. I hate it as well. But when you’re killing your own product in order to teach manipulative SEO types a lesson…you’ve lost your way!