Bobby - 12:08 pm on Dec 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

borisbaloney,

Please do not feel offended by my call to lurkers and other webmasters who have not posted specifics, I appreciate your posts as well as all the others who are pointedly trying to narrow things down here. I simply wanted to stimulate some of the quiet webmasters who might have something useful to contribute.

By the way, I agree with you that the answer is there somewhere, but we need to be systematic and exclude things one by one thus narrowing down the possibilities and focusing on what remains. And I believe we can do it. Of course Google may decide to change its song once we start humming.

:)

merlin30,

You opened my eyes...NONE of the top results has a link to my site for the search phrase I am interested in. I think that may have a lot to do with the filter. But then if this is the case we will soon have a "boys club" of sorts that you can only get into by getting down on your hands and knees and begging those at the top. Somehow it doesn't fit with my perception of Google's intentions. And how did the top sites get to the top anyway? I have my own network but apparently none of them is in the results. In my case there is a language problem, as many of the sites linking to mine are in Italian.

superscript,

besides turning to traditional means of advertizing it might be worth a try to seek out better quality links along the lines of what merlin30 suggested and see if that helps get you back in the SERPs. In any case it's probably wise to take some of your eggs out of the Google basket and consider Inktomi and Yahoo for the new year.

Sid,

as borisbaloney points out in your post

context is now more important than frequency and density

for CIRCA, that makes sense to me. It would probably be very useful to actively seek out links from and link to all sorts of associations for "tokens" or as we common folk prefer to say - words. What we need to do is actually start implementing these ideas and see if one of us gets back in the SERPs a month from now.

And uh...if you did go to school in a place called hope then that's a good sign.