Marcos - 8:58 pm on Oct 2, 2002 (gmt 0)

Well, this is what we found until now. Mr Vitaplease comments here [webmasterworld.com] seem to be mostly right. In order to fight “Googlebombing” and “Pagerank for sale”, they may have downgraded results when the Keywords is not in some important part of the on-page text, (to stop googlebombing), and the anchortext in ranking may have been tuned down, (to stop Pagerank monetization), specially if the linking pages do not have a good PageRank to begging with. Internal links, and links from interlinked pages may have been tuned down also.

Still, we have sees as many as 200 regional competitive cats easily dominated by unscrupulous Dmoz editors. We have done some testing on that.

To test if we really are in front of a Dmoz dominated Update, we have set up a Aspseek based small search engine, a GNU search engine with a crude PageRank-like ranking system. We have indexed around 1.500.000 pages, using as the starting point 700 Dmoz very competitive dmoz cats, including up to 250 pages per site, following up to 10 outside link, with up to 100 pages per outside link.
What we found was that 59% of our top 20 results on the 100 cat-related competitive Keywords where also top 20 in Googles new index, and 26% of our Top 10 where also Googles Top 10.

But we must also said that we have not been able to find a so-compelling relationship using no-competitive categories. A 2.000.000 pages index with non-competitive regional cats, using non-competitive Keywords, showed a very small correlation between top 10, top 20, and even top 50 results.

So, our working theory right now is, yes, as Don Vitaplease and others are pointing, small changes, probably committed in order to fight both googlebombing and Pagerank commoditization, have affected the index accuracy in many different ways.

We think the index is unbalance, or unless much more unbalanced than the last one, and, as a result, the weight of some previously no-so important characteristics are souped-up, opening the door for abuse.

In our case, souped-up Dmoz weight is the main factor now, prompting my initial, inaccurate claim, about Dmoz empowerment. It does not seem to be the case. Google has not chosen a drastic reduction of popular linking, as I voiced in previous post. That may be the final effect of the Algo change in some of the most competitive cats, but probably not the desired effect. So much for pro-Adwords, anti webmasters/SEOs conspiracy theories, and my apologies to the Googleserfs for so vehemently suggesting that ( just in case they cared :) ). I hope also Herr Googleguy can now stop laughing at me :) :)

But we do think this update and the changes committed are, to say the least, unbalanced, and the new algo is rampantly open to easy abuse. Lets hope Google good old Phd common sense returns soon, and a new, improved update takes place as soon as possible. In the meant time, I guess we can spend our time pointing out spammers to google, they are easy to find now: usually sitting at a Keyword near you, between #1 and #10. ;)