Over last few days I have been seeing news items about an upcoming google algo change.

Google say their hand has been pressed by a recent link bomb attack on automobile companies and they are taking steps to change the algo to stop these spam attacks being effective.

I guess they are talking about people who use software like xrumer but how will they achieve this?

Previous updates have seen the depreciation of meta tags, keyword stuffing, gateway pages and reciprocal links. What will it be this time?

My money is that people doing blog marketing will be effected. Seeing as the software exploits the comment field on blogs then I am guessing that they will work out a way to identify links in blog comments and greatly depreciate them.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Yes I have heard about this upcoming algorithm change too. I doubt they will go so far as to take away the benefits of blog comments. Google doesn't want to change their entire results. They will more likely target some particular attribute of how the link bombing took place....things like link building frequency/trends or the lack of a balanced link profile. Really they only want to target the spammers. If they change their results too much, people get pissed off. If the changes end up hurting results quality, they could lose some of their market share.

I have been investigating the link bombs and i think they confuse google with sub domains. For instance in a normal subdomain you would see something like this:

http://subdomain.maindomain.com

and the link bomb people set up hundreds of sub domains like this

http://1.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://2.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://3.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://4.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com

I wonder if it is the way they structure the subdomains that google will attack? This won't stop the mass blog comment spammers but lets hope google leaves things as they are and hopes user moderation will keep those results clean.

I'm hoping that this algo would only slightly hurt our ranking.

Rite now people are using these things to get backlinks -

Article Submission
Free Blog Creation
Blog Posts
Buying links
Blog Comments
Forum Posting
Social Bookmarking.

These above mentioned are easy to use. But however I think blog comments are really intact as no one will approve spammy kind of comments unless and until they are doing themselves on their own blogs.

Lets see hows this one is going to impact.

Originally Posted by Guerrilla

I have been investigating the link bombs and i think they confuse google with sub domains. For instance in a normal subdomain you would see something like this:

http://subdomain.maindomain.com

and the link bomb people set up hundreds of sub domains like this

http://1.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://2.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://3.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com
http://4.qwe.qwe.maindomain.com

I wonder if it is the way they structure the subdomains that google will attack? This won't stop the mass blog comment spammers but lets hope google leaves things as they are and hopes user moderation will keep those results clean.

interesting insight on the link bombs, i never even considered this.

Is this change still under way of finished yet? Thanks.

Google changing their algos shouldn't be news anyway. It's an ongoing process that will never yield a 100% spam-free index. IMO

Originally Posted by DoctorWebmaster

Google changing their algos shouldn't be news anyway. It's an ongoing process that will never yield a 100% spam-free index. IMO

Google periodically do a big updates that change the way they index pages. People who have been in this business for many years will tell you that these changes can overnight completely change the serps

Referring to blog exploitation: I think this is long since a settled matter with the emergence of the nofollow microformat.

i would have expected the new google update a few months from now well maybe a month and a little as it was in early april wasn't it that was the last time around. i gained some serp and pagerank in tht one so my work paid off nicely. i'll be curious to see what will happen next.
several of you seem to think it will something to do with blogs, but how would we know that? i assume some people here also do blogs or comment heavily in blogs...

The subdomain issue is not new and has been used effectively by many people for a very long time.. Google has claimed to address this several times in the past..

Google makes as many as 10 algo adjustments in a week, so again, not a big deal really..

If you take a balanced approach to your internet marketing plan, little changes will have no real effect and major changes will have very little effect on your rankings.. The problem with fluctuating rankings tends to come from a marketing approach that relies too heavily on one or two methods.. When those methods get 'adjusted' then rankings fall..