onebaldguy - 3:16 pm on Mar 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

Great posts caveman!

I do believe that there is a list related to 'sandboxing.' Though perhaps it is better thought of as a 'category.' The category is: Sites launched after March '04. These sites are subject to a different combination of algo/filters than sites launched prior to March '04. Being in this category

I tend to disagree because why would G not apply this new algo to sites that were published after Mar 04? Why was the algo not applied retroactively? G knows when sites are first indexed. If they wanted to apply the algo to sites less than 6-9 months old, they could have easily done this (which would have affected sites from as far back as June/July 03). It is possible that the reason they did not do this is because they added something new to the algo which analyzed certain data that was not available to them before Mar 04 (data they were not indexing).

What if they implemented something in the algo that takes into consideration time as related to links (temporal link analysis or something similar). Maybe they started indexing more data (date of link discovery), which they could then apply to the algo in a variety of ways. If the algo takes into consideration the link acquisition rate, they could easily filter out sites which had an unnatural link acquisition rate.

This is just a theory and maybe they were already indexing date of link discovery, but there may be some other data they were not indexing before Mar 04.