Could 'Hilltop' Be In Use?

Google did not kill affiliate links.

[jsbeads]

Assuming Hilltop is being used - Google did not kill affiliate links per say. What they do is limit the weight placed on the number of incoming links to the same page.

Hilltop is based on an earlier work by Jon Kleinberg. "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlink Environment"

On a broad based search term a set of Authoritative Sources are located by looking at the 200 highest-ranking pages for that exact search term (allow stemming if the exact term is not found).

If a large number of pages within a single domain point to the same page this is seen as a mass endorsement, advertisement or some sort of collusion among the referring pages – e.g. the phrase "This Site Designed by.." and a corresponding link at the bottom of each page in a give domain. [A domain as defined in HillTop is when the left most parts of the URL match, I do not know how pages on sites like geocities would be handled]

To eliminate this a parameter is added to only allow up to x number of pages from a single domain to count as a link.

[ciml]

I think that most people who've been analysing the changes at Google search would describe them as complex penalties designed to deal with various types of over-optimisation, rather than Kleinberg-style theming.

[jsbeads]

I've been reading through the Kleinberg papers along witth the Hilltop papers trying to figure what is the Authoritative Sources and Hubs for my keywords and topics.

Once I find them then try to get a link from them to me. It still looks like page rank to me.

One of the things that I've noticed is that when I do keyword searches, is that the Authoritative Source do not seem to show up in the results. If I do a back-link check on the pages that are ranked high then I find that they all have a links from the same pages.

Seems that the Authoritative/Hub page get sc*wed.