europeforvisitors - 2:38 am on Jun 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

EFV - do you think your G traffic problems were caused by "splitting your PR" between www and non www as suggested above? I think you posted elsewhere that you were skeptical of that explanation.

I think it could have been a contributing factor in cases where I slipped a bit in the rankings and the sites around me didn't change much. But I think changes in the algorithm played a bigger role. (For example, the top 10 places for some destination keywords were dominated by template-based pages from massive "deep but shallow" travel networks and e-commerce sites after March 23; that changed with Bourbon.)

I think your experience supports the idea that Google does NOT use the raters actively but also that the algo has some major challenges separating the good from the bad.

I'm inclined to agree. Having human evaluators play Whack-a-Mole with suspected spam would be a doomed cause from the start. It's more likely that Google's software would "learn" from human input (in this case, human spam or quality ratings) in much the same way that an e-mail spam filter tracks a user's input to learn which e-mails are likely to be legit and which are likely to be spam.