Austin, Other Filters/Penalties/Updates/etc. <br>In the years since has worked on creating other filters and penalties. At one point they tried to stop artificial anchor text manipulation so much that they accidentally filtered out some brands for their official names []. <br> <br>The algorithms have got so complex on some fronts that engineers do not even know about some of the filters/penalties/bugs (the difference between the labels often being an issue of semantics). In December , a lot of pages that ranked # suddenly ended up ranking no better than position # [] for their core target keyword (and many related keywords). When questioned about this, Matt Cutts denied the problem until after he said they had already fixed it. [] <br> <br>When Barry asked me about &quot;position &quot; in late December, I said that I didn&#039;t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We&#039;re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks. <br> <br>Recent Structural Changes to the Search Results <br> helped change the structure of the web in January when they proposed a link []. Originally it was said to stop blog spam, but by September of the same year, Matt Cutts changed his tune to where you were considered a spammer if you were buying links without using rel=nofollow on them. Matt Cutts documented some of his repeated warnings on the Webmaster Central blog. [] <br> <br>A bunch of allegedly &quot;social&quot; websites have adopted the use of the nofollow tag, [] turning their users into digital share-croppers [8] and eroding the link value [9] that came as a part of being a well known publisher who created link-worthy content. <br> <br>In May of rolled out Universal search [], which mixes in select content from vertical search databases directly into the organic search results. This promoted