hutcheson - 2:52 am on Feb 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

More speculation about this. We know googlebot is doing more frequent runs on "frequently updated" sites. Suppose that when a page is purged for being deemed "unworthy of continued listing because it's in a slum" -- then all the pages that POINT to it have their "bad neighborhood" value increased, AND ARE MARKED "CHANGED." This would cause the whole black-hole, um, website to be marked "high rate of changes, come back tomorrow". And the next day the city housing inspector comes back, checking the house next door.

Further trying to second-guess the google programmers (as opposed to the manual-page-trimmers in the black helicopters). The task of spotting bad neighborhoods is conceptually simple, but computationally complex. We've seen something that looks like "Hilltop" ROLLING IN in over the most common searches. Perhaps the "Neighborhood Watch" has been implemented in a similar fashion -- rather than taking a snapshot of the world looking for slums, a rolling team of inspector-bots (dropping out of black helicopters, if you must) seeking out artificial linking patterns in high-visibility areas (which are, of course, also near the most-common-search phrases).

Again, if this is true, using subdomains (rather than deeplinks) for doorway pages may be risky. Since Google treats subdomains like separate domains, subdomain doorways may look like separate doorway domains, triggering the neighborhood watch on something that could have been just a simple well-linked domain. New (and therefore inbound-link-deprived) legitimate sites that followed the latest SERP-perp fads might be affected.

OK, I'm done. You can have the tinfoil hat back.
<yawn>
What were we discussing?