This is one unamused bird…and also the new face of Google.

Folks who’ve been watching or doing SEO might have noticed the “Penguin Apocalypse” where Google’s newest PANDA update (codenamed Penguin) seems on a mission to seek out and destroy a lot of common optimization practices.

Stuff like keyword stuffing, link baiting, comment farming and article spam. Sites that have profited for years are taking a hit even bigger than the one they did when PANDA first dropped. Folks are still coming up with ways to solve it, among them my colleague and friend Mike Ehline of http://www.ehlinelaw.com/. Nobody’s certain yet what’s going to work best…

…but we do know that Google seems to be favoring…wait for it…compelling writing, relevant content, and the social collateral that comes from media shares. This means as writers the market just exploded.

The days of competing with six hundred thousand dudes from India are fading. So are the days of people thinking a program like Scrapebox can do as good a job as us.

Seriously, people. This is exciting news for freelancers. Saddle up.

Anybody out there with insight on SEO and the Penguin Apocalypse, drop a comment. I’d love to hear what you have to say.