pontifex - 7:12 pm on May 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

not the 1810s and coach and horses

hehehe... dont be too hard on him, that company is by far not what it was when he started posting here (I guess a lot watchers remember :-) and it was actually the reason I subscribed to WebmasterWorld!

Now I am not 100% sure as you seem to be that G is broken. Maybe they want it that way to be, which would be sad. For years there have been complaints that the big bucks outrank the mom&pop SEOs just by pouring dollars into text+keywords+link building.

As I mentioned earlier: besides our traffic loss in the long tail, there are a lot of sites suddenly showing up. That could mean they tried to tweak their algo to match the caffeine update and let hidden jewels bubble up. Sad thing is:

a) there are a lot of non-jewels (aka spam) sites surfacing while the big dogs still rule the tough keys

b) maybe the web is not as deep as everybody seems to think

Especially (b):

1. Google already had most of the accessible web in its index

2. New, good sites are created at least search-engine friendly anyhow

Getting back on the current state and the silence from G: I second you on the thought that this ride might just begun and that the result might look quite differently, when they turn the knobs again...

P!