Google is unleashing animals left & right on "suspecting" Internet Marketers

That or a werewolf. They're going to take their cues from "what most self-published authors are writing books about" on Kindle.

For sure ... they "knew or ought to have known", anyway.

I've been thinking about this question for years.

I never quite fully understand it.

Without writing a book, here, I think it's a big mixture of factors, of which perhaps the two biggest are ...

(i) Naivety/gullibility: just like the people who put up monetized sites at Blogger, the people who try to use Squidoo as part of "their" business, the people who use "free autoresponders" and the people who register their domain-names and host the sites attached to them all in one place rather than registering and hosting separately, some people really do imagine that all the nasty "accidents" one hears about are things that happen to "other people" rather than to themselves (i.e. they really don't know/believe/accept that they're stacking the deck against themselves), and ...

(ii) There are huge numbers of people whose only way of earning anything online is to sell/promote/provide "services" based on extremely ill-advised principles, and the fact they have to propagate and perpetuate all the bizarre beliefs of the Urban Myth School of Internet Marketing in order to do so appears not to bother them in the slightest. At one time, it was "spinning and mass submission services", and their sales/promotional pages were all covered in delusional/deceptive nonsense about "duplicate content", which they got hordes of beginning marketers to swallow for a while, until - thankfully - the Penguin updates caught most of them out on that one - but it wasn't the Penguin updates that made it all nonsense: it was always nonsense, right from the start, and many people said so openly even before the Penguin had ever been heard of. And a more up-to-date example: even now, after the de-indexation of so many blog networks, there are still (a few) people promoting "private blog networks for SEO" in spite of so many authoritative sources explaining (in some detail) why these are The Top Backlink-Type To Avoid, and in spite of it "obviously" not making any sense to try to base your SEO on the type of activity that Google is so openly and consistently explaining they're committed to identifying and penalizing. That's all nonsense, too, and Google-dependent marketers planning to do it may well end up with a ruined business out of it. But there you go: large numbers of "service providers" have a financial incentive to promote all this nonsense, and even larger numbers (of their recent customers) have an emotional incentive to accept it.

There are loads of other factors involved, as well, but for me those are the two big ones.

Good thread.

Many internet marketers choose black hat tactics voluntarily inorder to make quick money. If any animals try to harm they will definitely find an arrow ( another blackhat tactics) to keep them away

Panda is the biggest among 3, Penguin is bigger and Hummingbird is smallest so far size is concern. So, big G is targeting to smaller things day by day. I think, marketers should be smarter to avoid the new sheriff of the town. They can't give up their business, easiest ideas & strategies, but can update their strategies to comply with the Google updates, what I am doing and still getting results.

The next animal will definitely have 4 leg.

Lucky, I'm not in the SEO industry! Sounds like a constant war with Google.

There could be many reasons.

Maybe the vast amount of traffic available on G properties is too attractive to give up on them.

Maybe they have already invested too much time and resource and desperate to find a permanent solution.

Or maybe they don't know any better.

But when you say this-

you are probably correct, at least partially. Part of their plan definitely is to drive this "internet marketing" crowd away from their properties.

They only invite this crowd when they need to drum up some business. Case in point- G+. Internet marketers are probably the most vocal supporters of this platform. Wait until it becomes popular. And then listen to the same people and notice how the tone changes.

Well, I only do White Hat but hang around a lot of people who do other Hat techniques... and unfortunately whatever penalty they get never really outweighs the benefit of using their 'unfair' techniques.

Google will always count backlinks in some way, so many will continue to create millions upon millions of links. Google will never have a pure way of knowing if a site is good or not; if it does it by how long people stay on the site - then existing sites would dominate and no new sites would get a chance in ranking... if it does it by number of mentions from high profile sites, then sites preferred by these sites would only stand a change of ranking. It can't rely on one measure if it is to remain independant as a search engine.

If you get caught out you lose, but if you don't get caught out (and I know many people who are not), then you cash in quicker then pure white haters...

Sad, but that is the story.

The big G is taking its present route in penalizing websites for all sorts of reasons, not just SEO, but a recent observation is that they will be encouraging you the webmasters, to use certain services of theirs to help bring your website up to a standard which they set.

Check your analytics account or read my article below.

They are offering these free of charge at the moment with a caveat that they may begin to charge for them in the future. There is no given time frame for doing so or any indication of what the charges might be, but they will give you 30 days notice beforehand.

Google is very shrewd and will suck you in and then make you pay for it.

Welcome to the land of SEO where the goalposts keep moving and you evolve or die. If you're ranked and getting traffic be sure to leverage it because sooner or later your organic traffic will be a thing of the past and you'll have to start over.

The main problem with SEO, for the majority of marketers at the beginner-intermediate level is that you'll invest a lot of time 'figuring out' what is working and just when you think you have done exactly that, everything you thought you knew will become redundant.

The smart and nimble will continue to profit.

SEO is a bit like propaganda - you can believe what is put out there for public consumption or you can do what works 'in the trenches'.

Old practices worked for so long that it became a habit.

Hummingbird should make longtail question type searches easier to rank.

That's a good thing.

Looks like your trying to roll everything into being negative.

Google can call their algorithm updates whatever they want. And, maybe these names like Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird, relate to some insider secret on Google's part. Whatever the case, the results are the same in they are cleaning up Google search and making them harder to get into for lower quality sites.