Whitey - 2:18 am on Oct 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Not sure if this means anything to anyone, but I'm observing one of our site's :

"uncontested phrase in brackets" - Result No 1/2 - page 1
without brackets - page 3

"heavily competed phrase in brackets" - page 3/4 [ approx 30 below ]
without brackets - page 3/4 same as above! [ that's strange ]

I'm not sure if we're classified as an old [ 3.5 yrs ] site being reintroduced to the SERP's after a few fixes, going through some filter checks

or

If we're continuing to trigger a filter that puts us into the -30 bracket for only some common phrases.

or

a combination of both

....................................................................

Somehow, i think this is a penalty by degree system which ascribes a score to a range of filters for promotion or demotion. What each filter check is worth, [ other than the obvious one's ] only Google will ever know, but i think we're getting close to a stronger gut feel as to what is the most severe and the least severe ones [ accumulated could be a problem ]. So some degree is able to be estimated in conceptual terms.

It would be good to have a dot point list of things that might trigger this, and a dot point list of *factual* things that oppose it [ ie Trust - IBL's in ; age ; brand ; fixing the problems! ; etc ].

Then from this, it may be possible to arrange those things into *severity* levels.

Then from this we might be able to see sites that are existing, recovering and new.

This is a sort of parallel thread with, Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com], where we've cobbled together some thoughts.

I think this would get us closer to understanding things.

...................................................................

However, I do appeal to our friends Matt, Adam , Vanessa and GoogleGuy to provide some light on this. Clearly, webmasters need to understand in broad terms what these triggers are to better quality control their sites, and they have *TRUST* at least from those who subscribe and identify themselves at WMC/Sitemaps.

We really need some systematic guidance beyond the existing guideline, on the application of filters, broken down and reportable, either here or eventually and ideally through Webmastercentral.

In the interim something spoken or written would help. We don't need secret soup.

[edited by: Whitey at 2:21 am (utc) on Oct. 19, 2006]