Jane_Doe - 9:30 pm on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

>>>> Why does the 'Google Lag'/sandbox/whatever exist?

One more theory....perhaps newer sites, especially those focused on competitive terms have a higher bar / different criteria to rank than old sites and that's the way it's gong to stay. Google got a lot of bad press after Florida for creaming a lot of small business listings, so perhaps they decided to go ahead with their algo changes but grandfather them in, so it's much harder (needing more links, more themed links, more uniique content, time lag on links, natural linking patterns etc.) to rank these days and that is the way its going to stay.

That way the old businesses can't compain because they aren't getting hit (unless they have datafeed, duplicate content, auto gen pages, etc.) and the new web site owners can't really complain about "lost traffic" since their sites are new and they never had any traffic to lose.

It's just a thought but it's something I've been wondering about.