There have been so many reasons express here as to why results at Google seem to be messed up these days and I too have experienced problems with search results the past couple of months. Rather than being concerned about all this negative talk from webmasters, I wonder if this isn’t what Google has been trying to do for years; to create an index which can’t be figured out by smart folks who want to game it for their advantage? The more SEO experts complain and talk about Google being broken the better job many engineers at Google will believe they have done. Some people don’t understand that SEO folks and Google want different things when it comes to Internet search. Some mistakenly believe that Google will become upset when SEO people start talking about how poor their results have become. The only thing Google should care about is it’s advertisers and the folks who are not in the Internet business who use their search engine to find stuff. While I don’t have a clue what Google is really up to with these “BigDaddy†changes, I do know that their daily searches have been going up month over month while all these changes have been going on and that is all they really care about. One big loser with this whole new situation with Google has to be companies that sell domain names at cut-rate prices. Why, because new domains have been and continue to be punished by Google for up to a year? I think this is why we are seeing the so-called “sandbox†effect getting worse and not better. Some believe good linking can stop this “sandbox†effect, but I have my doubts. When you look at the huge number of domains that have been registered in the last few years, it’s no wonder that Google and probably soon other SE’s will put these new domain names into a box for a year or possibly more. I know this isn’t what new webmasters want to hear, but that doesn’t make it not true. From a human nature standpoint this type of action does make sense in the real world. In fact it makes sense when we all take a step back and look at the tremendous growth of the Internet. How many people do you know that graduate from college and go to work for a company and their first position at that company is CEO? None. Just like in real life, success takes time and also like in real life a person must have an employment track record before they can be promoted and move up within a company. In the early days of the Internet I looked upon this medium like that of “the wild west†where anything goes and law enforcement was no where to be found. Now the Internet is growing up and new websites will have to prove their worthiness over time just like anyone else in the business world. The average working person only has one job and they put their heart and soul into that job to try and move up within their company to a better position. I see the future of the Internet in the same type of way. People who own hundreds or thousands of domain names will be looked upon as “get rich quick†folks and ignored by the major SE’s. The only people who will benefit over the long haul will be the single website owners who spend all of their time trying to make their little piece of the Internet better. While few here will probably agree with my observations, only time will tell what is going to happen to the Internet, SE’s like Google and everyone else who would like to have a piece of this financial pie.
Google has some serious issues and they know it. IMHO what has happened has not been Gs goal and if it continues it can seriously affect their market share. If they can't deliver current and relevent results eventually people will slowly switch, then it will snowball.
Webmasters are the lifeblood of their revenue. We spend and publish more for google ads then the google.com site itself. As a whole, we represent a major amount of their revenue and thus stock value. If we, as webmasters, become dis-enchanted or even worse loathing of google, we will go to yahoo/msn/ask/whoever else to buy ads (in fact, I wont use adwords anymore, i choose others) or publish ads (yet to be a reality due to no good alternative to adsense, but soon...soon..). Google was built on word of mouth, it can also be damage (but not brought down) by word of mouth. Imagine 10's of thousands of webmasters who only used adwords and adsense and then google f's over their site like seems to happen EVERY christmas season. Well if YPN or Adcenter is available, maybe we will use that to get business instead of Google adwods. So yes, the # of searches have gone up, but we have yet to hear if their revenue has gone up, while I am sure it has, it could very well plateau and then begin to back off in the coming 48 months as competition heats up and webmasters continue to feel "screwed" by G.
Assuming that is true, and that it isn't simply because people have to do more searches simply to find what they expected to find more quickly, I don't think G are quite that stupid. They have messed up, but ultimately they will care a very great deal about their reputation, and the dangers that people despair of using google to run a search. They will know very well that if they don't deliver 'best' results then people will go elsewhere.
I might have missed something, but I don't recall them admitting anything about their results not being what they want them to be. I read a few things about how certain features are not working right, but nothing about how the results are showing up. I guess with time we'll see if the general public is concerned enough about these changes in results to stop using Google. In the mean time I know a bunch of people have been hurt by Google not listing their pages.
With such changes as cached crawling proxy servers, the BigDaddy update, etc. I do think we as webmasters may have to rethink our strategies in order to obtain and retain good rankings. However, we are trying to follow a serpentine target at this time with the flaws that are within the system, and locking in on that target becomes impossible, at least for the short run. SEO is not in and of itself a bad thing, it is a marketing strategy - no different than two brick and mortar stores competing, one finds an effective marketing strategy (a better newspaper?) and is successful, another may not. I don't think that Google's aim is to ruin SEO, just tone down the less desirable results, but there is alot of collateral damage right now. And I agree with Crazy Rob, look at the history of the 302 redirect problem, and the Florida update. The 302 bug devalued alot of links, (sites caught in one are penalized as duplicate content, PR0'd) and I think it was a major factor in that update. I have found posts that hint at 302 redirects as a blackhat position stealer (though the posts are a bit unclear) that go back into 2002. With all the current comments about disappearing pages in the serps, and older pages constantly reappearing, the 'snapshot' of the web and the link structure within it is blurred and not worth looking at. We need to be preparing for another Florida update, perhaps even worse.
I'm starting to wonder if there ever will be another REAL update like we have seen in the past. All I've seen recently are "rolling updates" with occasional BL updates which are mostly worthless because of the limited amount of information they provide. If Google doesn't plan on any more major updates, then what we are seeing right now might be the future of Google where stuff changes hour by hour and there seems to be no reason for what is happening.