steveb - 12:15 am on Sep 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

From my experience this definitely does not effect just new sites, although new sites seem more prone.

At the same time, new sites that seem to systematically not get hit are ones that spam blogs and guestbooks. These new "sites" rank very good right away (with their white bars revealing they are post June 1 sites).

What can we conclude/guess about that? Well obviously this spamming blogs gets you tons of links from all sorts of IPs/domains/hosts/etc. So volume of links from unrelated *low-quality* sites makes you (at least far more likely to) avoid lag time. But volume of links from high a small amount of quality domains doesn't (and of course a few links from low quality domains doesn't either). And then, it is near impossible to get volume of links from 1000+ high quality topical domains, so it is hard compare the effect of of this sort of great/diverse linking to the blog spamming link volume.

One oversimplified conclusion though would be: something new achieves a PR5+, goes into lag time. This would explain why the new sites ranking well are those that have thousands of anchor text links, but those links only make the page PR4 or less.

I don't think that is right either though, as sites avoiding lag time include those that blog spam but also buy highish PR links.

Still, I lean toward thinking lag time exists to combat "fake quality", that is, sites buying high quality links to pretend to be of quality. If that is part of the reason, obviously Google hasn't just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they have launched it with a howitzer.

(I'll also say that I am pretty sure lag time was created in part to help stabalize the serps pre-ipo. Why it contunies to exist is more puzzling.)