Why? It’s simple. Google is a terrible business partner. Why?
Because its recent actions have brought many webmasters nothing but trouble. Would you want Google to be YOUR business partner if it were a fella or a lady?
Think about it. Google offers to find customers for its search engines, but at a cost of time and/or money. However, it is also allied with a lot of other websites, some of whom are advertising for the same customers as you are. You are in effect competing not with Google, but with other business for a limited share of Google’s traffic. The trouble is that Google controls the Search Engines and makes its own determination about which sites are ‘good’ and which are ‘not good’.
But by doing this, you are setting Google as your intermediator, the intermediary BETWEEN you and your customer. It’s fine to have some form of intermediation. Ultimately, gossip, reviews, etc. are all forms of intermediation. Google is taking on the primacy as supreme intermediator, and you are giving them that power. Not the other way around.
Let’s imagine you open a store on the high street, would you bother getting online adverts in your first week? Hardly. If you thought your store was already good enough, you’d go out and make a fuss, drum up new business, get the business known in the community, … not set about redecorating the store (playing with themes, CSS/HTML), re-restocking the shelves (editing content) or second-guessing what those non-existent customers would like (using Analytics/Adsense Tools excessively).
I know because I actually co-own a real world business… and would hate Google to be my business partner… too capricious, too likely to stab you in the back, too willing to strike deals with competitors, no loyalty! A real business partner wouldn’t do those things.
From what I know (it’s only a little), phantom is actually a precursor to Penguin 2.0 that was released later, and perhaps was a dummy run for the full-on release 5/22. I hate to say it, but without definitive proof that specific links are spammy; removing back links may actually have the reverse effect on your site, like taking away a walking stick from a patient with a broken leg or two. They’ll fall over.
Ultimately, Google can discount everything, and has shown a willingness to do so… but it still has to have something to show in its index for millions of queries. Perhaps that’s why we keep seeing ehow, wikihelp & Yahoo answers… page after page. Everything else of quality has been discounted already.
In fact, given the shifting weighting… time spent ‘fixing’ what’s not broken isn’t really time well spent. However, tweaking our models away from Adsense to more worthwhile ends is. In the end, I think Google will end up with squeaky clean listings, BUT they wouldn’t be the first company to spend $$$ fixing what wasn’t broken only to find out that the market had changed (look at SBI!… a classic case: spent millions to build bb2, only to find out 20% of their customers have fled as a result of the chaos with Google).
But the really interesting point: taking a broad brush stroke to the site results and looking on SEMRUSH today while I was doing my hospital rehab, I noted that even BIG sites have received the Google THWACK. John Chow & Problogger have both got similar traffic patterns. Now I’m privy to a number of sites, but the same broad patterns affect many sites. And it doesn’t seem to matter what niche, what type, how much backlinking activity… the same broad strokes affect many sites.
So yes, in short, we should keep our store shelves, stock new products, polish the existing items, and keep things shipshape. But not to the detriment of our business: meeting customers.