Anyone notice changes this weekend

I haven’t noticed much with Google, but lately Live/MSN has been acting really wierd… like I have gotten clicks for very high ranking terms even when my site is nowhere in the SERPS… like ‘Online Casinos’, ‘Casino’, and a ton of other ones.

I just don’t get the SE’s sometimes.

2 big sites are gone.

onlinecasinotopics and acsr.

i think im right.

cheers
merlin

Looks like google was cleaning house with sites that used hit-counter services to embed links. I am seeing the same thing for other markets/industries where sites used similar strategies.

BTW – The sites arent totally gone, just bumped down to page 5+, so it looks like there were penalities, but not outright bans.

Google seems to be making a real effort to identify sites that are gaming the system these days so I wouldnt be suprised if there were some major serp adjustments in the near future. There have been at least 4 sites that were page 1 for “online casinos” that were hit hard in the last few months and all the affected sites in some way, big or small, violated googles backwards-ass terms.

I have seen that sites which are trying to build links with targeting particular keyword like “online casinos” etc and building all links with one or two target anchor texts, are going down in SERP’s , so in these days, if we will build links with different anchor texts but having those keyword within that anchor texts, will help, if you will try to build links with one anchor text, it can drop your web site in SERP’s on particular that keyword!