ciml - 11:54 am on Feb 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

Giacomo, sorry I didn't spot your Anatomy of a Search Engine link.

I'm glad to read that you had already found "poison words" to be widely recognised; to be honest I only discovered Google's use of them since the January update. My point, though, was less about their presence than the way that small parts of DMoz.org seem to be affected. People deduced that Google has 'duck taped' "anti-penalties" to some high profile domains; I now disbelieve that but I wouldn't say that those people had 'assumed' that Google was letting some sites off the hook, deductions were made from some evidence that points in that direction.

I guess I'm just trying to say that even though all of us are wrong sometimes, it's still worth trying. If we just follow Paul Boutin's wise SEO guidelines then we'll miss some important factors. Not because Paul Boutin's advice is bad, just because there's no one source of SEO information. Your idea that maybe chaos theory can describe the SEO's affect on search engines is interesting; if I hadn't done so badly with nonlinear dynamics as a student I'd have something to say on the matter.

"PR0 paranoia" is well founded, IMO. It seems widespread amongst people who use artificial PageRank inflation, but it's also affecting people who just happen to run a number of related services. As Brett says above, 'Many seo's have sleepless nights as we realize it is "Google or Bust"'.

I agree with your other comments. Webmaster World (along with the early Brin/Page papers and information from Google itself) is probably the best place to find information about Google. The people who I know have spent a lot of time researching the subject tend to end up posting here eventually.

I've had StickyMail about my "poison words" comment. I should have linked to Brett's article on poison words [searchengineworld.com], anyone who wants to see it in action should check the Open Directory pages with 'guestbooks' in the TITLEs. (Those pages are OK, they just don't pass their PR on.)

Brett, nice history of SEO. I think that a large part of the reason for these forums' rise to popularity is your personal breadth of knowledge.

> 98) [...] "sites are mirrored as a means of "bumping off" the competition due to alta's horrible dupe page detector."

It seems funny that, for Google, this started to happen in earnest in late 2001.

Calum