Google ranking change turns table on spammers

[mouser]

People on this site know that i'm not a huge fan of google and the incentives they have created that favor spammers and advertisers.

But the web is buzzing with a few articles today about some recent changes that have spammers scrambling to remove spammy links that are now going to end up penalizing instead of helping them.

The search engine optimization community has spent the last two years in a panic. SEO people flood our Internet with spam links and fake Twitter bots and paid traffic, to help bad websites look more popular than they are, to deliver fake viewers to web ads.

They now spend their lives on the run, Google nipping at their heels. Their biggest project? Removing all the spam links on websites like this one—the spam links that they put there.

http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-new-spammer-panic

[rgdot]

All good if Google and other search engines actually reward. If you get rid of something bad you better reward the good behaviour. In my experience setting up sites the latter is rare. I know of two sure ways of being ranked well:
1)A niche/specific subject or topic. You will see a high rank if someone explicitly queries the specific key words ... obviously if I search for "cody donationcoder" I should get donationcoder.com on page one. Doesn't need a complicated algorithm.
2)The site is popular .... again, if first result is cnn.com/_topic containing your query string_ what's the point of algorithms?