After several sleepness nights of trying to understand the big algorithm change, I realized that we may have been running around in circles, flooding the webmasterworld forums with questions, when all along, the answer may be just right under our noses.

A quick summary of the so-called Dewey update (for the sake of those non-SEOs who find themselves on this site because they’re searching for a pink gadget or something, blpht) :

• Drastic Google SERP movements were noticed starting late February to early March.
• Rankings and indexed pages across data centers have been fluctuating.
• Various affected sites dropped their rankings (from 1st page to 6th page)
• Some have got their traffic and ranking back, some haven’t.
• While Matt Cutts asked for feedback and offered to answer inquiries, there was not a word of confirmation or denial that the was indeed an algo update.
• Forums are endless, until now.

Turns out, this whole thing may simply be a case of penalizing bad linking patterns. The case study in Google Webmaster Help Forum (which started Feb 22) showed the same symptoms — all rankings dropped to about 6 pages down, causing traffic and revenue drop. Apparently, the diagnosis for that one particular case study — and let me just say it helped a lot that Matt Cutts came out to give his two cents — revolved mostly around the bad network of paid links, reciprocal links, and links from non-related sites (in this case, porn sites).

To make the long story short (lesson learned, definitely), Google may be simply improving their way of detecting bad linking patterns (not like we’re not aware of that little detail.) Hence, the tactics that used to work for you may not work anymore. So if you’ve been hit by what you thought was a “mean” algorithm update, then you may be doing something wrong — consciously or unconsciously. Are you buying links perhaps? Or relying too much on similar sources for links? Or sponsoring Wordpress themes?

Time to clean up those link profiles. And don’t you wait to be penalized before doing something. Prevention is, after all, still always better than cure.

As for “Dewey”, I think we better put that keyword to rest for now, before innocent people start reading about a Google algorithm change when they’re looking for dewey decimal systems.