SEO Desperation - The Branded Naked Inert URL Fiasco

The latest SEO game invented by Google in it's Penguin webspam update had alot to do with link anchor text diversity - or the lack of it. It took a few weeks of 'What The Hell Happened?!?' to ranking and now tanking site analysis for some of the more observant in the SEO community to correlate at least one (of several) aspects of backlink profiling that caused some of the traffic drops that the Penguin update delivered.

Commercial, top-money keywords were often hardest hit and instantly devalued for many sites - simply because the backlink profile and agressive SEO link building tactics had 'over-weighted' them. Whatever money keywords that were used and mattered MOST to your site were now toxic, Toxic, TOXIC!

And so 'Anchor Text RE-BALANCING' was born -- the notion of 'thinning out' money-keyword heavy ratios with even more deliberate, contrived 'naturalness'. A new era of link building tactics towards NAKED URLS like www.mywebsite.com, mywebsite.com, or http://mywebsite.com are becoming quite the fashion, as are BRANDED links of your name or business.

But the real stupidity Penguin update inflicted was a whole new game of going after INERT anchor texts to mimic (ahem) 'Naturally Acquired Links' such as "....visit this site for more info." or "check out this great source of information, or this other one here!"

Thanks to spintax and automated submission tools, Google is now getting exactly what we think it wants - MILLIONS of craplinks aggressively built every day going after inert phrases like these:

{click|{visit|click|check} {|this {|link|site}}|go} {|{||over|right} here} {||now}
{read|learn|see|look at|discover|find out} {{the facts|this {|info}|more {|info}} {|here}|here} {|||now}

And so it goes. For some, this sort of heavy-handed deliberate gibberish anchor link strategy might actually be, well, part of the magical 'Penguin Site Recovery' formula - (a keyword phrase which has become a million-dollar keyword in its own right as of late!)

Sheesh! This is the best Google can come up with? A new, stupid algo that invites the next stupid wave of stupid SEO behavior to get seen on the internet? Is this what the Cat and Mouse game has become: deliberately engineered 'Organic-ness?', contrived 'Natural-ness'?, tilted 'Balance'?

Ugh. I feel sorry for all those "Divorce Attorney Dallas", "Dentist In Los Angeles" anchors which are now sending NO post-Penguin traffic to... uh, websites that actually are about: Dallas Divorce Attorneys or L.A. Dentists... Madness, kids. It's madness.