It slays me to add more confusion

[pshea]

You know that cute little hotbot feature revealed when you show results with 'full descriptions' that indicates the date the page was submitted? Well, tonight in search of ink-answers, I started to pay attention to it. The number one result for my primary kw combo was submitted in May of 1999. And some others with better ranking than mine were also subm in May 1999 and another as far back as Oct 1998. In all cases, these are sites that consistently rank well over the other important inks, anz, canada, etc., like top 10/20.

This number one site has only 17 links pointing to it. A site that beats me has 5 and was last submitted 5/99! I have seen how "links to this URL" changes from day to day, so maybe tomorrow it will show 3 million links to the number one result and I can accept that, but May 1999?

It just slays me. Is cloaking technology THAT good?

[Brett_Tabke]

That is interesting info isn't it. I've been watching that for a long time. I've always been surprised people haven't mentioned that tid bit in public any where.

I believe that the date is the date the url was originally added to the database - not necc the last time it was spidered.

[pshea]

Take a look at your own sites, does that really hold true (re: date of first submission) -- it doesn't for mine. Across the board, the dates for my sites match date of last submission or spider.

Today I will start to check more dates of submissions on other SEs if I can find them.

[engine]

Me too, I'm gonna watch this more closely.

[pshea]

Examined my primary kw combo for top 20 results only.

Canada, Anz, iwon with practically identical results: 4 pages of top 20 in excess of 7 mos old, one hits at number five and one that dates back to Oct 98 hits at 17. Rest of pure ink through 100 are fresh, like 10-90 days.

Hotbot's first 22 are from dmoz who must be responsible for delivering old pages in the mix to the tune of 36% or a whopping 8 pages in excess of six months old, the number one result being one year old. Of the 22 coming from dmoz, five are no longer even in dmoz and have old submit dates accordingly.

AV returns 30% of the top 20 or 6 pages which are over 6 mos old, four of these are in the top ten.
NL returns 15% or 3 pages, the oldest of which is 10 mos old, none of them are in the top ten.

Then, there is whatever filtering HB is doing to what it gets from dmoz which I can't figure out, how are they handling what dmoz delivers? Is HB filtering or just taking what dmoz hands them? Probably only an insider there could tell, but evidently both are dropping the ball on freshness.