mhansen - 2:01 pm on Mar 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

I hate to jump on a bandwagon, but G* serp's are a really mess right now, logged in or not. I am seeing obvious MFA sites, less than 1 year old, re-written or spun-out low quality content, loaded up with 2-4 adsense blocks above the fold. It's not just one or two long tail queries either, its all over the place on informational queries!

Has anyone ever considered the huge financial upside to G* when they "test" these serps and show poor results just for a few days of the month? One estimate I saw claimed G* answers more than 3 billion daily search queries. That's a lot of incentive to stay in a constant state of "testing" when the results always benefit the shareholders.

I know we have a lot of people in this forum that believe the don't be evil mantra G* spouts as their motto, but it seems like every 2-3 months, these monthly G* update threads are filled with reports of junk serp's, and MFA sites topping the results. If it happened once a year, I would think its a coincidence... when it starts happening monthly, I see it as a planned income stream.

If I had to mention anything that I get from it on a datapoint level, it's that the MFA sites seem to be replacing the how-to and lower quality informational type queries that we were told Panda took care of.

Edit: For the sake of disclosure, we have not been affected by recent changes at G* in the last year, and we DO employ an adsense block on a few sites we manage.

MH