Bobby - 6:34 pm on Dec 19, 2003 (gmt 0)

What if your pages have been pre categorised for certain search terms

My take is that the filter is applied to searches in a dictionary based on whatever Google's engineers thought would work best.

For example, let's say that the words "christmas gift" are in that dictionary. A search including that phrase or "term" if you like would be subject to the filter.

This does not mean that your site will not show up for that particular search phrase, just that it will be scrutinized.

Now MY site may use that phrase equally to another site but I may get filtered out. Why? Ah...that is the $64,000 question.

Perhaps page rank plays a role, and backlinks which have that phrase give you "bonus points" so you don't get filtered, whereas another site with the same PR but NOT HAVING backlinks with that phrase would be filtered.

You can build all sorts of algorithms to determine relevance to a particular phrase or set of keywords, but in the end there is a threshold point at which you either make the team or you don't.