The deal was the "Florida Update," which is Google.com's new maneuver to squeeze money out of webmasters. They did this by changing the nature of their ranking system so that sites that normally ranked high with optimized sites, instead rank low.
A perfect example of normal search engine optimization is having a name like shopping.com, then having links to the site that say "shopping." Apparently, now, this kind of normal optimization is penalized by Google. Of course, this totally turns everything upside down and flies in the face of a decade of the way optimization has worked. Frankly, it's no less than idiotic.
In Google's defense, one of their main reasonings for this move is that some web sites sell text ad links based on Google's PageRank™ system. This move by Google is another effort (the first one being the 2002 crackdown on link farms) to curb this practice, and to minimize its effect on Google search results.
Regardles, as you can imagine this has had an impact on the quality of search results at Google, and their results are no longer as good as they once were.
The last time Google made such a major change was when they tried to penalize Link Farms . In the end they backed down in the face of a lawsuit. Possibly, they'll back down again this time in the face of the unpopularity of this move.
What is to be done?
Just remember, there are other search engines besides Google, and Alta Vista's results have always been better anyway.
