Regardless of what you may think of such a site I can say that compared to many other sites of this nature, I have tried to ensure there is useful content and that there is nothing overtly offensive. Whilst many of the sites remaining on the search results are not.

I just thought I would add this, as there seems to be the idea that nobody has suffered from this change.
I would welcome any comments. Please no morality debates please.This is a pure algorithm issue, that may have affected other sites.

I am sure that some web sites will lose traffic, but that is because there links are not from the heart. Inspiring natural linking, opposed to hiring some guy in New Dehli on getafreelancer.com to give you 100 inbound links for 98 USD are not the same thing.

Personally, I think the perfect internet would have no SEO firms. Just my humble opinion though. In the interests of full disclosure, I am not an SEO blackbelt either. So take my advice accordingly and trust no one.

This is wonderful! This could be the best thing that Google has done in some time. The idea that anyone can cause a page to rank for something that is totally irrelevant is preposterous, and if a page doesn’t have relevance, regardless if a link says so, it shouldn’t rank for it.

Now, if they could only devalue the uTube videos that shouldn’t rank, then we would be in business.

Google understands that if they provide irrelevant results, then the user will find a better source. This is good news for users, no matter how you slice it. As far as collateral damage, I think that the developers should do a better job at building content and links that are relevant.

We are here to get traffic, might as well get the users that are looking for what we offer.

I think the truth will surface sooner or later as we see if other sites are affected by this. One thing seems apparent though, this seems to be a binary filter. You’re either in or out. I wasn’t able to find whitehouse.gov in the top 400 places for ‘miserable failure’.

Somewhat related, an Irish Google bomb for the phrase ‘telecoms poodle’, which points at the Irish telecoms regulator, is still in tact. I presume this is because of the relevant word ‘telecoms’ in the phrase.

An impact of this algorithmic change is that anchor text will no longer be considered as useful meta data if the phrase isn’t on the page pointed at, but…

A number of the patent applications written by Google’s Anna Patterson on her Phrase Based Indexing talk about using a method like this to eliminate Google bombing. They add that if the phrase used in the anchor text is a “related” phrase that it may still have some impact:

If the anchor phrase A does not appear in the body of URL1 (as in FIG. 8a), then a different step is taken to determine the inlink score. In this case, the indexing system 110 creates a related phrase bit vector for URL1 for phrase A (as if phrase A was present in URL1) and indicating which of the related phrases of phrase A appear in URL1. This related phrase bit vector is then used as the inlink score for the link from URL0 to URL1.

See the section labeled “Document Annotation for Improved Ranking” in Phrase-based indexing in an information retrieval system. Matt Cutts stated that he can’t confirm or deny the use of bit vectors like this, in a response to me at Search Engine Land, and it’s possible that the method described by Anna Patterson isn’t being used. But, it’s also possible that it is, and it is worth thinking about and discussing.

I don’t think that would be an effective algorithm.

It would make sense to have this part of the algorithm look for relationships in the anchor text to the site. So if the number of inbound links with the same anchor text is X% in relation to the entire set of inbound links, throw a flag. If the anchor text in question has no thematic relationship to the overall website, devalue the inbound links and anchor text.

This would allow a site like Apple.com to continue to rank for “laptop” even though the keyword appears no where on the page.