During or immediately after Google has updated their systems, a quick visit to most of the search engine discussion forums one can not help but feel the sheer desperation and panic contained within some of posts. Websites that were prominently ranking in the search engines for their particular business’s keywords, sometimes find themselves dropping rapidly after or during these Google updates or Google dances as they are sometimes called.

Generally the complaints are all very similar; I have done nothing to my site but now I am no longer in the positions I used to be. Oddly enough the forlorn webmasters all offer the same solution to their woes; we should all get together and boycott Google. But really what has Google done?

Google and their engineers update their system in an effort to try to thwart the attempts of dishonest marketers to manipulate the search engine to give their sites an unfair advantage. I have gone in and looked at the code for a few of the sites who post their woes on the message boards and a surprising number of them didn’t appear to be doing anything wrong within the code.

When I see that I have to wonder about the problems that could arise within the stuff one can not easily see. Perhaps they have mistakenly linked to a site or two that is not looked favorably by Google. Another clue as to this being a linking issue comes from Matt Cutts (a Google Engineer) himself. In his Blog he writes that sites shouldn’t be part of any type of linking scheme but fails to identify what Google considers a linking scheme to be.

As the days and weeks go by I am sure that the SEO community will gain insights into the latest Google update. Naturally, the SEO community will be offering up their valuable insights to those who visit the search engine discussion forums so visit them often for the latest developments.