Bloggers are talking about new Google measures this year to crack down on blackhat SEOers. Everyone is advised to run a check on your sites and remove any features that might make Google angry, before you get purged. Read more here: Google to Come Down Strongly on Negative SEO Practice
Good find, rep added. I wonder how this will affect WP blogs, which use header h1 cloaking by default.
They'll warn you on webmaster tools if they feel you're cloaking: http://searchengineland.com/google-adding-new-spam-warnings-in-webmaster-tools-60582
Surely they won't penalize any WP sites for that, right? If it wasn't h1 cloaking by default, they might have a point but that's going to affect a lot of innocent people.
The guy states in the article that Google hasn't commented publicly on it. In fact the only source he mentions in the article is a tweet by Matt Cutts. Which means about 99% of the article is pure opinion. For the most part I don't have to worry about anything. I use absolutely no black hat seo methods for my websites and I never will. Of course this is actually good news for me. With all the Black Hat SEORS out of the way that's alot less competition.
Yeah no need to worry if you don't use black hat techniques and if you do then you already know there is a chance to get banned.
I looked at Matt's twitter and saw nothing: http://www.twitter.com/mattcutts It's just an SEO company trying to get credibility
I wouldn't blame the company. Typically I always check the Alexa rank of a website trying to judge it's credibility. In this case it was 4000 meaning it should be a good source for information. Chances are it was a guest post that didn't get it's sources checked. Bad Journalism.
I have seen Google is deleting many blogspot blogs who was created for linking (links in blogroll).. this show that Google is already working on it. So, remove links form blogroll before Google penalize it.
I think no matter what kind of measures google use to crack down black hat methods, there will always be a way to get around it. it is a battle never ends.
No sources and poorly written article... No disrespect but you need to do more research if you want people to read your blog.
People are so paranoid. Shouldn't be using a blog roll to go to your main site anyway, but I doubt that even plays anything. The thing to worry about is duplicate content. Anyway, the article was bogus, just a press release that was reposted to hell. Nothing legit about it. I'm sure anyone who has been in the SEO game for more than a month are already aware that google does what it can, non stop, not just the first part of the year!
If there is anything like this, we have to hear it from Google directly, it is better to play save when building links.
google is also not crawling websites since 16 december . Certainly there is something going inside google for 2011.