The recent shakeup in Google's search results, which set the SEO (search engine optimization) community buzzing and saw tens of thousands of webmasters watch their site ranking plummet, was in many ways inevitable. Almost all SEO companies and most savvy webmasters had a fairly good handle on what Google considered important. And since SEO, by definition, is the art of manipulating website ranking (not always with the best interests of searchers in mind), it was only a matter of time until Google decided to make some changes.

If you've been asleep at the SEO switch, here are a few links to articles and forums that have focused on the recent changes at Google:

Articles: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2003/dec/1prt.html http://www.searchengineguide.com/lloyd/2003/1125_bl1.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?cat=1 http://www.accordmarketing.com/tid/archive/ google-update-florida.html

Forums: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/ http://www.jimworld.com/apps/webmaster.forums/action::topiclist/ forum::google/ http://www.searchguild.com/viewforum.php? f=1&sid=3d5d777a7a9c7dda31622896015f733a

To date, most of the commentary has been predictable, ranging from the critical and analytical to the speculative.

Here's a typical example from one of our SiteProNews readers:

"I'm not sure what has happened to Google's vaunted algorithm, but searches are now returning unrelated junk results as early as the second page and even first page listings are a random collection of internal pages (not index pages) from minor players in my industry (mostly re-sellers) vaguely related to my highly-focused keyword search queries."

So, what is Google trying to accomplish? As one author put it, Google has a "democratic" vision of the Web. Unfortunately for Google and the other major search engines, those with a grasp of SEO techniques were beginning to tarnish that vision by stacking the search result deck in favor of their websites.

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