The SEO world is on hyper drive over the recent news of some leading High PR link suppliers going under. Large groups of people are now in panic mode with sites dropping daily, services closing their doors due to clients sites crashing, and the forums are full of new horror stories everyday. Google has been on a war path taking out amateur groups and the effects are clear to see. I'm sure you've seen what I'm talking about. PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS
I'm not sure which websites you are referring to. In many cases, websites and businesses go under due to financial reasons. Large companies have high expenses to keep their data centers and staff running. Unless they are successfully operating as a business, profit or non-profit, it's only a matter of time before they go under. I'm not so sure if it's just a "Google" thing. Google is merely a search engine that spits out what they believe is the most relevant content to the end user who is searching for content. The only thing they are doing is judging a website based on performance, relevancy, and popularity. I wouldn't necessarily blame them for a business going down. Could you be more informative about the services that are going down and what your sources are? If you provided more, we could go further into discussion.
I don't want to provide any company information out there. However, just know that google is doing their best to penalize as much website as possible, especially websites that are secretly selling links on their homepage and pages. Google tracked a lot of websites so far. They are also penalized that does not stand out. That is the reason why it took them this long to get the PR update rolling out... I don't want to say too much here..... In addition, when google robot crawl into your website, they do more than just checking the content of your site. they make smarter robot crawler to detect anything that is not within their guidelines...
Well, now we're getting some where. In regards to selling links, that is something that Google highly discourages. Their Starter Guide to SEO clearly states this. They do not want businesses to run link campaigns. Those are unnatural backlinks. Google encourages social response. Links should come from other people at their own will. People will share links to websites that they enjoy. They are encouraging people to make better websites that people are willing to share. Since quality backlinks have an effect on positioning, Google does not want companies trying to buy their way to the top of their serps. Especially if they are not receiving the income from those paid links. Google will penalize those who are trying to manipulate the system. A website that is selling high pr links is not a quality website intended for users searching for information, media, or accepted services. It's a website who's intentions are to manipulate Google's algorithms. Which deserves to be penalized in that sense.
The only ones panicking are the people who were manipulating the search results to begin with. The rest if us have always followed the rules and are once again benefiting from the last algorithm update.
This War is one side only Google will win and all SEO Peoples will lost.. I think future of SEO is end now.
That is naive, websites will always need to be built well and promoted properly - it will just need to be done smarter. Here's an analogy, in my country it is illegal to bribe politicians but special interest groups still employ lobbyists to talk to people in Government to get changes made and to give members access to key people. The lobbyists are paid for their time. Politicians should be talking to people anyway but their time is limited so they filter according to who they can trust. A lobbyist will work hard to gain that trust. In the SEO world search engines should be giving page 1 to everyone but they can't so they give it to the sites they trust. An SEO will work to build that trust. It may need to be more authentic and less lazy in the future.