How Google is Using YOU (and your marketing budget)

WARNING: Yes this is a rant. But it's small.

I decided the algo updates (aka "Panda" and "Penguin") have nothing to do with improving the quality of the results.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear me rant for an hour, so I will sum it up this way instead:

Google is a business. 
The business of Google makes money primarily through ads (PPC).
SEO does not make Google money.
Big sites with big money paid SEO companies to rank them organically with SEO.
Google sees SEO as competition for PPC.
Google knows websites with lots of links have lots of money to spend on marketing.
Google came up with a plan to get that money. 
Google devalued sites with lots of links. 
The sites that lost organic rankings lost traffic.
These sites need traffic.
Sites use what once was their organic SEO budget on PPC with Google instead.
Google pockets all the cash.
Google continues to feed the public with confusing propaganda regarding SEO.
Google improves free tools to aid in PPC management.
Google inundates website owners with free ad coupons.
Google has no problem serving your website up in the paid listings even if you were penalized organically.
More sites decide to use PPC instead of SEO for website traffic.
Google pockets more cash. 
Quality websites are nowhere to be found in the organic rankings.
Crappy websites that have no budgets for SEO or PPC remain untouched. 
Google claims they have penalized sites for breaking their terms. 
Google wins.
SEO loses.

Jenny moves to Bing. (half kidding)

Blah. 

Google Tweaks Algorithm

I don't have time to write a big old blog post right now, but FYI...

BoingBoing says: 

Google tweaks algorithm; content farms and splogs wail and rend their spammy garments

"Google this week launched a significant change in search algorithm intended to push down low-quality, SEO'd-out-the-ass content farms in favor of less spammy sites with more useful information."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html   

"Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

So, the QUICK nutshell?

Buy in content links
Add fresh, UNIQUE content to your sites often.