What’s up with Dewey?

There has been plenty of chatter recently regarding the recent changes in the SERPS, which have since been coined ‘Dewey’. I’ve read much about what people speculate this update is about and many have said that they believe Google, whether intentionally or not, is giving more weight to spammy links. I saw a comment on WMW that sums it up pretty well.

“Seems to be a lot of consensus that the shuffling is about links and link value. I am in a highly competitive industry and I definitely concur. I’ve spent the past three days doing in-depth backlink analysis on the competitor sites that jumped ahead of our site (pushing us to #11 from #6) and they exhibit obvious link building practices that Google supposedly frowns upon…mainly link purchases. I’m coming across a lot of run of sites. We have been steadily cleaning up our paid links, which seems to have been a mistake.”

Although I personally haven’t seen any dramatic changes in the SEPRS that I track, I have seen evidence that lower quality links that Google supposedly frowns upon have been effective in incrementally improving rankings. Regardless of the effectiveness of these easily obtained low quality links, I feel that this is not the direction Google intends to go with how they give credit towards links, and to start acquiring low quality inbound links as your primary linking strategy due to changes brought about by Dewey could come back to haunt you shortly.

I believe what is being seen in the SERPS is more of the byproduct of an algorithmic flaw brought about by recent changes (similar to the position 6 issues a few months back) than the direction Google intends to go with their rankings. I can’t conceptualize why Google would voluntarily start placing more weight on links that require less effort to obtain and therefore more likely to be low quality/spam. If it is the case that these recent changes were a mistake, we are in for a huge shakeup in the not-too-distant future when Google gets it together and all these links that are proving so effective will be nullified and rankings will shift accordingly. Over the next few days/weeks I think it’s best to maintain a wait and see attitude. If nothing changes, it looks like it could be a plentiful season for link farms.