Hissingsid - 4:23 pm on Dec 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

My thoughts exactly - the filter needs to be given many examples of the 'good' as well as the 'bad.' If the number of examples is s very sophisticated but the effects that I've seen could be as easily explained by simply switching off allinanchor for sites that match a pre-determined search term.

Perhaps we are giving them (the Google engineers) too much credit.

I'm still floundering about trying to rationalise the motivations and the methods being employed. There are two main motivations that I think could be at the bottom of all of this.

1. Overcomming a problem which would otherwise affect the floatation.

2. Pushing advertising products into growth and profitability so that a major opportunity can be demonstrated prior to public floatation.

Or a mixture of the two.

Problem
The problem is the ease with which results can be manipulated by allinanchor link text. All of those articles about Google Bombing the term miserable failure ranking George Bush's resume on the White House web site #1. Must make investors nervous if the Google bubble is being filled with mischievous blogging when will it pop? might be a question in an investors mind.

Simple Solution
If Google wanted to overcome this problem in the commercial areas that really count then they could simply remove allinanchor from the algorithm for "protected terms" and Google Bombing would be defused for those terms.

Opportunity
If Google wants to maximise the opportunities that it has bought with AppliedSemantics, broad matching of advertising, domain parks delivering Adsense ads then it can only do this if it reduces all of the crap floating about by virtue of the ease with which sites could be pushed up SERPs by manipulating anchor text.

So if you remove allinanchor from the equation in search terms with commercial value you address all of these things at the same time. You target this algo shift at the areas most open to abuse while at the same time opening up an opportunity for yourself in these same areas which co-incidentally are also the terms with the biggest ad spend.

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that, but it probably is.

Best wishes

Sid

Just closed the quote box

[edited by: Hissingsid at 6:07 pm (utc) on Dec. 15, 2003]