I’ve also been rather aggressive on ranking well for the keyword ‘make money blogging’. I use to appear on the front page or sometimes the second one, but now I’ve dropped off completely.

Did Google block me for that keyword? If so, I’m going to have to throw a tantrum. I’ve been working hard for that keyword. I’m holding a contest for a month of free advertising, and one of the ways to win is to link to me with ‘make money blogging’ as an anchor text. I suppose I did get banned for it. Urgh.

ReviewMe won’t be harmed b’coz people buy reviews not for backlinks

The only thing that will always work is writing for your readers. Good quality content that people will read and even link to will always work - no matter what Google does.

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=17814

Suggests Google is executing Javascript. The owner claims to have had a redirect that was broken up in eval statements. If what he says is true, Google is definately doing something clever. It could be something as simple as loading the page in a browser, giving it x seconds and then reading the location back, and if it’s been redirected, it’ll use the new page. It could also be reading the DOM after executing the script as I suggested above. That’s a massive change to how it used to work though, so I won’t jump to any conclusions just yet!

However, I would not be surprised at all if in the future Google started loading pages up in browsers and letting them execute javascript, and then analysing the resulting DOM (even considering elements that are visible/invisible and maybe even priority to elements “above the fold”). This would reduce the impact of people using Javascript to manipulate what Google sees (eg. spam keywords into the page, and hide them from the user with javascript). It would be more friendly to dynamically built menus/navigation and ajax sites. However, the complexity involved makes me think it’s a while off yet!

I wonder if this has anything to do with the late pagerank update. Maybe they’re making big changes to try and make their results better.

@Jeni: I would hope that if you use nofollow you wouldn’t be penalised in any way, because Google tell us to use nofollow on paid links. Whether or not the advertisers would be happy with that though, I don’t know. It depends on whether they consider the amount they’re paying include the backlinks or not.

Given Google’s site also says paid links are a fact of the web, I’m surprised they’ve dumped TLA from the results like that. Especially now that someone else is profiting from this even more now!