steveb - 2:05 am on May 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

The most maddening posts on this forum are the ones that pointlessly kill electrons telling people that Google and search engines aren't everything, to work on sites, blah blah blah. Hello, people do that. But Google delivers an enormous amount of people to websites. It is completely irrelevant if that is 4% of your visitors or 94%. What matters is getting one more is good, getting one less is not good. This is a Google forum. If you want to talk about needlepoint I think that is Forum 37.

Most posts here are not fixated only on people's own sites. Nobody else gives a crap about your site. Most people here are trying to understand a major Internet-wide phenomenon affecting millions of searches for millions of sites. We each understand our own niches the best, and can relay observations about what we see.

The fact that this phenomenon is bizarrely being played out in the public eye is a rare opportunity for peek where we usually don't see, and while speculation is more likely to be inaccurate than usual, this is the best time to speculate.

For example, if Google does magically apply guestbook spam filters one of these weeks/months/decades, having observed where guestbook-dependant sites rank now compared to then might be an incredibly valuable bit of information. Same with free for all links, anchor text, etc.