“Yippee-ki-yay, MFs…” @Faryna shouted as he pressed publish on WordPress.

Keyword repetition is out.

Google search results changed this week. Yes, the pages are cleaner. Lighter. You may or may not be a fan of white design – that’s your problem. Anyway, the new look may or may not be what sticks. But that’s not the big deal. In fact, the design change was a distraction.

The big deal is that Google is ranking pages and relevance somewhat differently this week. And SEO experts still don’t know what to say or how to game the new factors. Despite the hush, last week’s update to Google’s new Panda search ranking algorithm has had the kind of impact on business that is garnering lawsuits against Google.

Most of the conversation about the Panda algorithm is a month or two old. If you search for it on Google. Wired’s Steven Levy interviewed two of Google’s Seach Engineers in March and, honestly, Singhal and Matt Cutts gloss over SEO concerns and stick with the happy talk about quality. See for yourself here.

Angry Birds Panda

More than likely, more than a few pages from your favorite SEO playbook have to be ripped out and forgotten. In fact, SEO people should love this! Quite a few websites will need a new SEO strategy.

SEO people will get paying work again because once well positioned sites are falling out of their position on the results page… onetwothreefourfivesix- justlikethat. Like unripe figs.

For better or worse, SEO is going with social signals in a bigger way. And DIY black hattery by-the-numbers will be put on hold until the new game is figured out. It’s going to suck for all the SEO hacks. On the other hand, Google search results may actually get more relevant and useful to regular people looking for useful information on the internet.

Social Signals

I suspect too that it just got a whole lot better to be a good blogger. And better than that, is to be a socially-engaged, good blogger… in a thriving blogger community like Triberr: Paul Wolfe, Adrian Klein, Dino Dogan, and Stacey Herbert come first to mind.

Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo , co-founders of a blogger community platform called Tribber, are going to score hard from this game changer. Being an encouraging, socially-engaging, and collaborative-minded member of Tribber just became a default competitive advantage. Outside the tribe, few can offer more to those who obsess with a search engine fetish for search rank and search result position.

Getting direct mention, description and link in blog posts is going to be hot. All three – not two out of three. Just like I did in the preceding paragraph.

Kipple

Keyword repetition is out and, yes, lots of other SEO tricks and cheats.

I’m not talking about comment luv. Links in comments are about as useful as they ever were. In other words, marginal value but a necessary labor of love in site and page rank development.

Bad copy-writing was forced upon us as authors and readers by that Google-mad, keyword sociopathology. Yes, Google started the problem. It’s only right that they fixed the problem. In a recent post, for example, I used the term, backyard monsters cheats or cheat, six or seven times.

That post was, of course, my own tongue and cheek eulogy for keyword sociopathology, otherwise known as kipple.

Spam by any other name

Kipple? Yes, Kipple. Keywords had become what J.R. Isidore referred to as Kipple. Kipple is useless objects like spam; “like match folders after you use the last match…”

Note: J.R. Isidore is a character from Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

According to Isidore, The First Law of Kipple goes like this: Kipple drives out nonkipple. Another way of stating the First Law of Kipple: Spam (the redundant keyword – for example) drives out non-spam (aka, content). From where I sit (with the other special people), it sure looked to me like keywords were driving the content out of online content.

Yippee–ki–yay, MFs.

…

Stan Faryna
11 May 2011
Bucharest, Romania

If you’d like to connect with me, follow @Faryna and tweet me up on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/faryna

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About Stan Faryna

Mr. Faryna is the founder and co-founder of several technology, design and communication companies in the United States and Europe including Faryna & Associates, Inc., Halo Interactive, and others.

Stan Faryna served as a Global Voices author and translator. Global Voices is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society.

His political, scholarly, social and technical opinions have appeared in The Chicago Defender, Jurnalul National, The Washington Times, Sagar, Saptamana Financiara, Social Justice Review, and other publications.

Mr. Faryna also served as editor-in-chief of Black and Right (Praeger Press, 1996), a landmark collection of socio-political essays by important American thinkers including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Copyright

Copyright 1996 to 2012 by Stan Faryna.

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