chrisnrae - 4:02 pm on Jun 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

"Did anybody else see their site(s) constantly moving in and out of the Dominic update and then for Esmeralda to drop them way down in the SERPS."

Yes, across the board. Sites that held top ranks for long whiles, bounced in and out between top spots and no where to be found all throughout dominic and now are gone totally so far in Esmerelda. This is on a variety of sites, a variety of keywords, a variety of webmasters.

"However, the new ranking algo seems a bit screwy as some of the web's oldest most established and authorotative sites are not showing up under searches they have been synonymous with."

Agree on that point as well. Established sites with good content and backlinmks that have consistently held top 5 on major keywords for over a year are now no where to be found. Some indexed and not showing, others not indexed at all, but showing hundreds of quality backlinks. Very weird.

"I'm wondering if a google is only counting backlinks that have been around for longer than 3 months."

I have been speculating this since before dominic... all of my sites are taking months to show a backlink when doing a link:domain.com search, even though the pages of other sites linked to me are cached with my link - yes, quality, related sites with my link being on a PR5 page. I am wondering if this is google's way of thwarting pagerank buying campaigns, or at least making them pay a lot more for it.

Is this "semi penalty" that keeps being mentioned something new or something old now being called by a new name?

One site I own has had ten new pages indexed and 50 new backlinks added with this update, yet, PR dropped. Weird.