steveb - 3:33 am on Apr 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

Reading it more closely, I'd say much more sane than claptrap, although as noted the idea of linking to Amazon seems a rather suspect signal of quality.

A few notes (hey GG, get a pencil)...

- I've had links to news pages on my main pages that link with a date as aprt of the link; my reading is that this is seen as bad (which of coourse makes no sense logically) but I've removed the dates from the links.

- I shouldn't ignore every garbage link spam request as "get new links constantly, in ever increasing numbers" seems valued

- my goodness, sending your links to gmail users (presumably in a non-spam way) is actually something valued. Sorry Google, but that doesn't follow. (Same with hurling your URL into Google Groups via signatures, etc.)

- going to run off and renew my domains for ten years now; the weirdo seo tactic of 2005

- nowhere is there even a hint of "we understand that new documents will very often immediately get large numbers of links from related documents" (new pages on domains are often included in sitewide navigation). This omission seems weird.

- get backlinks gradually, not necessarily naturally

- if you use third party contextual ads, use Google's competitors if the contextual ads generated link to areas of commercial spam; use Adsense if you get served ads to mainstream stuff (the revered Amazon...)

0093... I've seen pages that have been hijacked but have reappeared rank significantly lower and not regain their prior-to-hijack rank; this could explain it, unfortunately. If you lose rank through no fault of your own, it will be harder to get rank back

0114... heh, coming soon, the Google browser

0133... anybody sure they know what this means?

<I ain't saying any of thse make sense or are right, just the notes I made; I do think most of it made sense for Google to do, but in some cases, they seem to be not doing well with some aspects of its implementation, most obviously the blanket nature of the sandbox>