Google and Negative SEO

If there's one thing that can be said about Google, it's that the quality of its search results has steadily been declining over the last two years. Their increased focus on semantic search no doubt has something to do with this. Another factor is that recent changes in their algo have made negative seo (or should we say search engine degradation?) more easy.

Google opened Pandora's box when they started penalizing sites for inbound links. Since November 2011, we have seen an enormous increase in the (negative) effect a high number of obviously unnatural inbound links have on a sites position in the SERPs.

The following forum threads seem to indicate that the proverbial feces is about to hit the fan:

• trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study...
• wickedfire.com/traffic-content/1...
• warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-...

Once the news hits the streets (or the major news sites) this will most likely result in full-on link-slapping warfare and Google will have no choice but to change its algo again. Maybe that's a good thing. After all, isn't the fastest way to destroy a metric, to flood it with so much noise it becomes instantly useless? Then again, the paranoid may think this is all part of Google's plan to identify link builders. Google emails them an "unnatural links" notice and as a result Google gets them to admit which links they built and which ones they didn't.

As is always the case when dealing with seo problems: We may never know for sure.