Increased importance given to spammy/educational domains in SERPs!?

[Webrevolve]

Hey guys,

Can anyone shed some light on these bizarre and confusing SERPs which Google seems to be producing following their latest update??

For example, we have a client who targets "payday loans" with another targeting "IT services".

However, since the update, the former keyword brings back a host of spammy domain results while the latter seems to have given all focus to educational institutions like universities.

This just seems utterly ludicrous considering that if I'm searching for "IT services" I don't want the help desk of a local university - that's completely irrelevant, right?

Can anyone provide some information on what seems to be going on?

Thanks

[Alex-Harford]

I think I remember reading something about Google toning down the impact of their EMD update.

[Webrevolve]

There also seems to have been an increase on the prevalence of EMDs - anyone else picked this up?

[Alex-Harford]

This is what I was thinking of: http://mozcast.com/ - you can't check your own keywords, it's based on 1000 that MozCast selects.

Here are a couple of blogs related to it:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-week-in-the-life-of-3-keywords 
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazy

[Webrevolve]

Thanks for the reply - i've not seen the stability tool, where is this in the pro account?

Getting some strange results, yes the it services results of the last few days do not make any sense whatsoever. Will have to see what happens with these....

[Alex-Harford]

[payday loans] is probably one of the most competitive, spammy keywords there is. Page 1 probably often has significant changes, there are loads of black hats who set up a new site and spam it to hell to the top of Google, only for them to disappear a few weeks later when Google catches up with them, with the same process repeated again. Hopefully Google will get better at combating this. SEOmoz has a tool for checking SERP stability for a particular keyword, though I'm not sure if it is public?

The [it services] one is crazy. I even get the same problem if I search [it helpdesk services] and [it helpdesk] - though not all are universities. Something to point out to Google I think!