rfgdxm1 - 5:37 am on Nov 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

>My feeling is that link popularity and Page Rank is a natural filter. As spam filtering improves these sites will start to lose rank anyway, as people generally dont link to "selling" sites unless there is something in it for then. Any good objective product or service review site with reasonable popularity should be able to outrank a 100% affiliate or e-commerce site.

The problem here is what if the searcher just wants the cheapest sellers of widgets, and doesn't care if the site also has useful, informative content about widgets? In any case, I have a big problem with most of the people whining about the quality of commercial SERPs because I find it impossible to look at such a SERP and say if it is good because my criteria of what would be best may be very different than somebody else's. Only if a search for "widget sales" comes up with a lot of sites about purple penguins or such would I say this is bad.