The_Contractor - 1:13 pm on Jun 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

Well, I haven't read through update thread – never do. I can say that what I am seeing in some serps that I have followed for 5-6 years doesn't look good at all.

I can only say what happened in a couple areas I watch (10-70 million results) and they are:

Lots of cloaking. Some of these have been gone from Google for a years and they are back. Some have suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

More mirror sites are showing up also – not like Yahoo, but Google had always been pretty good at finding complete duplicate sites and not showing them.

Many large sites gone to be replaced by sites that offer a single page or just a few pages on the topic. Also seeing more pages show up that are using free hosting services.

I am seeing more error/blank pages like "This page doesn't exist" , "page moved", "account does not exist" etc. Some of these "page moved/does not exist" have been in the index for literally years on a few .gov sites – they have gained positioning in this update.

Very "corporate" sites. What I mean by that are the big money spenders with huge affiliate programs and multiple sites that end up taking the user to the same place at the end. Often these cloak for Googlebot - not even good cloaking, change your UA to Googlebot/2.1 and you see all the keyword stuffed pages that the user cannot see without filling out multiple forms. 99% of this spiderfood/info pages will never be seen by users/visitors.

So, what do I see? I see the age "signal" being cranked way up – way too far in most cases. Just because a page has been indexed since the late 90's doesn't mean it's good or relevant. I think this is the single most damaging "signal" that has been cranked up and could be the single largest cause of some very good sites dropping from the serps. It is the common denominator I can really look at and see clearly for the reason behind abandoned pages/sites showing up and the sites/pages that have risen.

I also see that "bad" cloaking still works wonders, but the sites that I see doing it are also "old" sites so I am not going to jump to the conclusion that the cloaking is working – just that it's not hurting them.
The same goes for mirror sites that have reappeared after 3-4 years. I don't think creating mirrors is a smart thing, but the ones showing up have the same common denominator – they are old (7-8 years).

Google has thrown out a lot of "babies" with the bathwater - which were actually some of the most useful sites (for visitors anyways).

My own sites? I only have a couple. The one that has been hit has always been my pet project and has been around for about 5 years. It has "never" been affected negatively by an update (once lost by google though for a month a couple years ago). This is the first update that has affected that site in a negative way.

Will I change anything? Nope, built it for visitors and I will continue to do so. The only sites that moved up which pushed it back are sites "older" than it. I cannot do anything about that, so I will continue doing what I have for the past 5 years.