Matt Cutts answered to the question

“How did Interflora turn their ban in 11 days? Can you explain what kind of penalty they had, how they fixed it, as some of us have spent months trying to clean things up after an unclear GWT notification?”

Interflora is a major UK flower site that was hit by a Google penalty early this year, but Google didn’t call out this company publicly, after the reports of penalty came out, the company wrote a blog post warning people not to engage in the “buying and selling of links.”

Matt Cutts proceeds to try and answer the question in more general terms “Google tends to looking at buying and selling links that pass page rank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times then the action that we take more and more severe. We’re more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeat violation.”

Cutts says “It’s not something that I would typically recommend for everybody to disavow every link that you’ve gotten for a period of years-but certainly when people start over with completely new websites they have bought-we have seen a few cases where people will disavow every single link because they truly want to get a fresh start.”

In other words, if you’re willing to go to such great lengths and eliminate such a big number of links, Google is going to notice.

If you’ve got links from some very spammy forum or something like that, rather than trying to identify the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to da a ‘domain:’ . So if you’ve got a lot of links that you think are bad from a particular site, just go ahead and do ‘domain:’ and the name of that domain.  Don’t try to pick the individual links because you might be missing a lot

What is Hummingbird and how do you know if it’s affecting your site’s ranking?

Hummingbird is the nickname that’s been assigned to update, 90 % of searches are affected. By comparison, that’s much higher than most of the Google algorithm updates we see from Google.

Google announced the algorithm update at a press event on Thursday along with some other interface and knowledge Graph tweaks. Hummingbird was described as the biggest algorithm change since the caffeine and that it is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

In particular, Google said that “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account rather than pages matching just a few words”.

A lot of people are worried about its impact and of course Panda and Penguin which we’ve been talking about all summer and even last year, are those dead? The answer to that seems to be, no, not entirely. They are using elements that they learned through Panda and Penguin in this new Hummingbird update.

This is really just an extension of Google’s ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which does have implications for SEO, and while webmasters may not have to worry about a major drop-off in rankings like with updates Panda or Penguin this could be more of an ongoing struggle for those competing to get on search results pages.

For now, according to Google (per Sullivan’s report), you don’t need to worry about anything, and Google’s normal SEO guidance remains the same.