treeline - 6:04 pm on Jun 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

My experience with several informational sites that essentially follow G's guidelines (by chance, not design) has been that almost every one of their shakeups slowly moves the sites higher and higher over time. The irrelevant, the link spammers, the out-of-date-for-a-decade slowly drift down.

While an individual search phrase could move either direction, the average across multiple searches is consistently better. Just basic, solid industry authority sites, no fancy games going on. The sites have seen NO bad Google updates in the several years I've been paying attention.

The guidelines aren't hard to follow unless you're trying to game the situation and skate as close to the edge as possible. Why on earth should G tell you exactly where the line is? Then you'd all go there immediately in an effort to confuse their algorithm.

There are other ways than buying ads (never tried them), and I don't think selling ads is the goal of the guidelines. Helping real searchers find what they want keeps G king, so helping out the average surfer is the goal.