There are a lot of theories and rumors floating around. Most of them involve some sort of "filter" or penalty being applied to certain types of sites. Filtering out extreme spam is nothing new for Google. Among other things, they've been trying to catch hidden text for several months. I just don't see how a filter, or any combination of filters and penalties, could explain the current search results.
Rumor 1: Google Is Using A Dictionary - There are far too many search terms affected, for it to be as simple as a "dictionary" of commercial search terms. Google might have a list of topics, for which they have computed a topic-sensitive PageRank score, but they aren't trying to penalize anyone, they're trying to deliver better search results.
Rumor 2: Google wants to force commercial sites to use Adwords - The fact that there are two conflicting and equally implausible conspiracy theories should tell you all you need to know. In reality, Google has deliberately kept the "paid advertising" and "free search results" separate, and there's no reason why they would do something like this. Google doesn't need to "force" anyone to buy advertising.
Rumor 3: Google is using "Bayesian Spam Filters" - There is no conceivable way Google could implement a "Bayesian" filter to recognize "search engine spam," and I can't believe that hundreds of very intelligent engineers would attempt to do so.
Google isn't trying to "penalize" or "filter out" anything. The people at Google are trying to build a system that identifies the most relevant web pages. Where they use filtering, it's to avoid being tricked by hidden text and that sort of thing. Bayesian filtering is very different.
Rumor 4: Google is punishing reciprocal links - The theory here is that Google is punishing web sites that trade links with other web sites. Maybe, if that's all you do, but that's probably been the case for some time.
Rumor 5: Google is punishing "optimized" pages - The rumor here is that Google is trying to drop "optimized" pages. Not only does this not hold up under close scrutiny, it doesn't make any sense to begin with. Another way to describe an "optimized" web page would be "a well structured page that clearly indicates the relevant topics."
Does Google penalize dirty tricks like hidden text, over-stuffing HTML tags, etc.? Of course they do, but that's not optimizing, folks, that's spamming. Penalties for spamming are nothing new.
Rumor 6: Google is punishing "link text" - Nope, not true. If it were possible to create a penalty for another site by linking to them with the wrong words, you'd have complete chaos in a very short time.
Rumor 7: Google Is Out To Get You, And It's Personal - I haven't done a whole lot of detailed research to substantiate my beliefs on this, but trust me, it's not personal. The search engines are all trying to deliver quality search results, and maybe you aren't giving them what they're looking for. That doesn't mean you don't have a good web site. It doesn't make you a bad person. Maybe you just need to do some things differently.
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