caveman - 10:30 pm on Jan 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

We've added a few more to our list:

Are you a victim of (badly constructed or malicious) redirects to your site from external sites?
A widely discussed, multi-dimensional problem: [webmasterworld.com...]

Have you been VERY aggressive in adding external links to your site?
WARNING: Potentially controversial.
I believe that we’ve seen strong evidence of aggressive link building campaigns leading to G dropping sites/pages way down in the SERP’s.

In one case, a competitor’s site that was in the midst of a very aggressive link building program (and no other discernable changes) vanished from G’s visible SERP’s...after climbing dramatically for a short period. Since then, some of the site’s pages have returned, but only way down in the rankings. The site continues to benefit from their link building program in Y’s SERP’s. We can find no other reason to explain their fate, and we've heard thru the grapevine that they've concluded same.

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Our *opinion*:
1) “Unnatural growth” filters are now in place (a G only phenomenon.)
2) The less overall strength/quality a site exhibits, the more likely it is that ‘unnatural behavior’ - perceived by G as too much SEO - will lead to negative consequences.
3) Since the Florida update, sites have pretty obviously needed to clear certain 'hurdles' (quality indicators) to do well in G's SERP's. Those hurdles recently got higher.
4) The better a site is at clearing hurdles, the less likely it is to be filtered for unnatural activity, to the point that some sites are almost bullet proof.

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Have you been NOT aggressive enough in building links?
We recently saw the first notable changes in both Y and G that we’ve seen in a while. The G changes led to significant shifts in some SERP’s. Sites with an insufficient number of quality backlinks dropped substantially. Lazy webmasters repent! (I have.)

Another instance of what we now see as G’s ‘higher hurdles’ philosophy, where the hurdles just got higher.

Have you been VERY aggressive in adding pages to your site?
WARNING: Very controversial, and quite possibly wrong, but I'll include it anyway since this thread is a checklist, and some believe this hypothesis may have merit.
Background: Several months ago, two of our own sites got badly hurt in the G SERP’s after adding a large amount (+35-40%) of new pages all at once. These sites were the only two of ours that had large amounts of pages added simultaneously, and the only two that got hit within weeks. I might have chalked it up to coincidence, but a thread on the subject [webmasterworld.com] seemed to suggest that others had similar experiences.

This is admittedly unproven. And without question, other webmasters have confirmed that they added large amounts of pages with no ill effect. But, it is our belief as noted above that much of how G operates these days has to do with ‘hurdles,’ and it is possible that those sites to which we added many new pages at once did not have a sufficiently large number of backlinks to avoid being filtered for perceived ‘unnatural growth,’ whereas others who added pages in bulk (and had no problem) enjoyed the advantage of a much larger number of backlinks - and that is what kept them above water.

An alternate explanation is that this issue could have had something to do with dup filters (i.e., the addition of those pages put too many pages on the site that looked like other pages). However, I doubt this, since it was mainly the page structures that were similar, not the text/content. And I'm not sure why this would have taken the entire site(s) down.

One more reason that this point is controversial: Some new sites are clearing the sandbox by employing linking strategies that are massively unnatural. Their success however, could be a function of having cleared some hurdles by *so much* that the site becomes nearly immune to filters. :-)

Bottom line: Enough webmasters have posted, stickied or emailed on this to make me think it is at least a possibility.

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Our overall conclusions: It has never been more important to follow Brett's rules for site building [searchengineworld.com] (what else is new?)...or, to learn how to blog spam (not recommended). :-)

FWIW.