caveman - 6:07 pm on Nov 4, 2004 (gmt 0)

Jake, WRT Hilltop, there are two differnet areas of assessment that we have paid a lot of attention to:
1) affiliation, and its consequences;
2) themed links, and their consequences.

Affiliation
Evidence of affiliation assessment is apparent to me, but with a caveat. We saw after Florida (when I believe Hilltop kicked in) that - in several commercial categories where we had multiple site entries with insufficient identity safeguards - we lost a bunch of those sites...meaning that their positions in the SERP's dropped dramatically. That was interesting. What was also interesting was that in most of those categories, our lead site maintained its overall position or even benefitted.

Of note, after taking care of items related to methods for determiniming affiliation, we saw most of the sites come back. And those that did not come back happened to use common templates to others that were again thriving. This seemed to reveal one of the roles that filters were playing in the weeding out process.

The caveat It has always struck me as possible that what many including me view as Hilltop-style assessment could instead be little more than a series of well constructed filters. At which point, are we looking at Hilltop, or a system influenced by Hilltop.

Theming
Here too I believe we have evidence, but no strictly contolled tests.

Since we operate a large number of sites, we did take the opportunity post Florida to evaluate different hypotheses in our quest to regain some lost traffic (commercial categories).

One thing we did was to identify a pair of very similar sites in different categories. The sites were deemed similar by virtue of size, construction, PR, linking patterns, and performance in the SERP's. Call them site A and site B.

For site A we went and got 20 good backlinks (PR 6-7) from non-affiliated sites, in categories unrelated to site A's category. No help; the site stayed buried.

For site B we went and got 8 good backlinks (PR 5-7) from closely related sites (two hubs, six authority). Within four weeks site B had popped back to its former glory while most webmasters in the immediate post Florida environment were still bemoaning the disappearance of their sites.

During that time we noticed another interesting change. In some SE's, the site listings in the SERP's were occasionally showing URL's taken from the backlinks (nothing new there). What was intersting, and still sometimes is, is that post Florida the URL's were typically associated with authority sites. Before Florida, when we saw that, the URL's more typically reflected high PR pages. The assumption here is that a really important backlink is displayed, but that seems a good assumption to me.

On a related note, though I can't call this technically Hilltop, we have virtual certainty that links from unaffiliated, relevant pages that are tightly connected to our own topics perform better than identical links from unrelated pages, for certain kw searches.

All circumstantial I know, but with things like this I have my own 80/20 rule: As a manager, I try to understand 80% of the technical side of things that I'm no expert in. Trying to understand the last 20% is counterproductive. In the case of Hilltop, I'm 80% convinced that it's there. But more importantly, if it's not, I'm 100% sure that operating on the assumption that Hilltop is there is beneficial to the long term health of my sites. ;-)