MikeNoLastName - 3:18 am on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

I would just like to throw in a few more suspect pieces of circumstantial "evidence", presuming the document is indeed valid (still not entirely convinced of this) FOR the case that this is a MANUAL evaluation and degrade vs. someone elses claims that it is simply used as INPUT for the automated algorithm. I suspect that some basic level of the eval results probably ARE used to form an algorithm for clearing out the MOST obviously spammy sites "on sight", but then there are the rest...

1. When I started to suspect, early last week (you can search the back threads of the Bourbon 4 update and other threads for my timely remarks) that Adsense might have something to do with it. I took a cross-set of pages which had been dumped in the update and removed ALL references to Adsense (as well as all links external to the site - coincidently, TWO of the points mentioned in the spamminess eval definition). This is the only significant changes made in the last 6 months to many of them other than updating static info. All these pages were being Googlebotted at least once a day. I even gave them an extra couple days making sure the caches reflected the newest changes. If it was indeed STRICTLY an algorithm decision, this would imply that the algorithm ONLY decided whether they were spammy and deserving of the degrade. Nothing happened! They stayed right where they had been dumped to. If the algo was deciding it should have re-instated them in their old positions upon re-spidering and re-indexing (how many times have the serps been reorderd over the last week?). Therefore, it would appear they ARE manually degraded and once degraded, stay there until MANUALLY reversed. Likewise, I suspect the earlier allegra degrades were a weaker version of the algo and earlier batch of manual blacklisting, and since almost none of those tanked sites have come back, I suspect those tanked this time are in for the same long haul for the same reason.

2. There was a report of some certain site which was alleged by the document specifically as "whitelisted", first dropping in the ranks, and then, early on in the update discussion as being RE-INSTATED very close to their prior SERPs. My purely circumstantial guess is that this is when the algo-dumped (i.e. those dumped by the generic algorithm as being spammy by the definition internal to the base algorithm), but previously MANUALLY whitelisted sites were re-incorporated/re-authoritated into the database.

BTW, I concur with someone elses statement (and this is my reason for wondering about the validity of the document) that it is a surprise, with the number of students supposedly having worked on this system, that this has not come out much sooner. Any employer knows, other than the gov. of course (who only under the threat of federally treasonable charges extracts obedience to secrecy clauses), that students in general, of all people, have the least common sense and loyalty, and the least to lose and the most to gain by revealing these kind of secrets. I'm curious, if it's indeed real, if it was revealed for extra school credit, because they were REALLY P'd off at being recently fired, or for having THEIR website tanked. :-)