econman - 2:09 pm on Jun 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

There are two distinctive things about the group of sites that has suddenly jumped into some visible positions: they are relatively young, (a.k.a. suffering from the so-called "sandbox" effect), and they are information-intensive. That's why I'm curious whether one of these factors might be shifting in this new algo mix.

Earlier in the thread, I noticed this comment about information vs. ecommerce sites:

"...One of my observations in my areas is the increased ranking of wikipedia pages on the updated DCs. ..It seems that the new knob settings favor informational sites above commercial ..."

Hence, the hypothesis. Of course, there could be other factors at play, as well. For instance, wikipedia has an extremely intensive, and diverse, pattern of internal links. So, for example, the observed boost to visibility of wikipedia documents could be due to changes in the way Google is evaluating internal links.