followgreg - 7:03 am on Oct 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

Surely those DC bring back up more legitimate sites like a breeze of fresh air.
Let's say the worst of the worst appears much less but it's not very good either, let's say not as bad.

However as Tedster mentioned earlier in this thread, querying a DC does not mean much these days.

Surely they could not get it this wrong by accident.

Your confidence in large corporation functioning is impeccable. :)

I'm not sure myself how this can happen to that degree. It's less visible on high volume keywords but Google strength used to be those thousands of weird keywords typed and returning no so bad results.
Currently you get lucky if you even find what you are looking for in the top 20, in your own language and without virus warnings.

At this point I see again more and more US specific businesses ranking on Google TLD's other than .com.
At the same time Google.com keeps showing these sites from abroad or locally specific while my queries are NOT locally specific.

Concerning the URL mentioned in backlinks I don't really find much difference now than in the past 2-3 months, no domain in URL and pure paid textlink from about anywhere rank about anything on Google.com - fast. It wouldn't be such a bad measure to use this as factor but before that Google should be able to determine whether or not the are able to weight incoming links as close as possible to what a human could do...and they are showing right now that the hell they can Not do it.

I also think that Google is able to parse domain names for some time now. They can understand widget1widget2 as widget1-widget2.
They started adding weight on some domains based on their names back a few months ago when they've implemented their "anti-bowling' algo.
I thought it was a huge mistake at that time and consequences are right in our SERP's now, it's a nightmare of cheasy:

bestwidget.com
buycheapwidget.com
widgetservice.com
widgetforwidgets.com
[any number here]widget.com

Amazing how cheap mortgage, adult, and the like so-called blogs get indexed more frequently than some other pages that used to be valued and sometimes are not even indexed anymore. Ahhhh yeah that's right, I got it: scrapping, semi-automated copyright infringement, paraphrasing, are made from sites that often refresh content.....fresh content is good, fresh content is relevant, or is it not?

It really, really feels like they've turned off everything that used to filter the difference between Good and Bad, on theme and off-theme. Same if their algorithm was reduced to very few factors.

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