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That is to say, should one be checking to see if the sites are out of the sandbox regularly or only when they know there is a major Google update? :)
Thanks
Mc
Everything is fragmented, and it's all in the direction of less predictability and less quality in the SERPs. While less predictability in itself this may serve to make life difficult for spammers, by now it's gone way beyond anything that can be construed as purely a set of anti-spam measures.
Absolutely on the money!
I cannot argue about search engine technology or the mathematics of this problem but I do have a masters degree in common sense (from the university of life). This qualifies me to state that this is definitely not an anti-spam measure. How anyone can still argue the case for this is beyond me. This is not anti spam, it's anti new content. "New" in any other commercial context is attractive and Google would never deliberately restrict all new sites from featuring. This would be committing commercial suicide.
Also, if this was an effective spam measure Google, as a commercial entity, would be bragging about it everywhere, "Google announces amazing new spam prevention technology.", etc.
Can I refer back to the point I made yesterday in message 188? On a search for a NINE word phrase, a search engine that cannot find a web page with that NINE word phrase as its page title MUST be defective in some way.
Such, deliberate or not and to what extent, it might be fair to assume that the current situation suits them. That being the case this could be a very long term thing.
And keep in mind Yahoo search, because its always been lagging behind in sorting its information out. The rate at which they spider and sort, while obviously publically acceptable, is decrepit when compared to Google, even with its problems.
I've given up trying to fight this head on, I just use an older and established domain for important content these days.
Since I have bought my new domain, my site no longer ranks
anywhere in the top 1000!
It has been about 5 months now :~/ Googlebot visits very
regularly, crawling my sitemap and newly content-ized pages.
How long must I wait?
On a search for a NINE word phrase, a search engine that cannot find a web page with that NINE word phrase as its page title MUST be defective in some way.
These are household words. I was looking for sites that may have dropped out due to large numbers of sitewide links, which is true of the site in question. Other than that, this site it is a normal, independent e-commerce site. The domain is two years old. These two words might be the most important keywords for the site.
The A B order put this site at number 1 in Google, and the B A order put them out of the top 1000. Remember, no quotes. I repeated the experiment a dozen times, because I couldn't believe my eyes.
On Yahoo the site is number one for both A B and B A.
On MSN it is number one for both A B and B A.
On beta MSN it is number one for both A B and B A.
On Ask Jeeves it is number 4 for A B and number 3 for B A.
I would have to say "Google is broken" from this example. I know that Google's word proximity matching was overwhelmed by their hotshot semantic fiddling a year ago during Florida, but this example is ridiculous.
The other possible explanation is that some of their latest "penalties" are plucked from a grab-bag of very subtle "gotcha" tricks, and that playing games with word proximity is one of them. But it's much easier to believe that Google is broken on this one.
I should start collecting examples like this.
Whether broken or not, I think Google has a management problem. Management at Google is unable to determine priorities and allocate resources in a rational, adult manner.
Despite the fiddling, cleverness and whatever else they have been up to, I've seen more 'shotgun' spam coming and going than I ever did from the birth of Google until last fall.
If it's an anti-spam thing that's deliberate, somebody should be fired, because I've seen it hit good sites, while allowing more spam in than they had previously.
Some terms are squeaky clean though, making me wonder if they hand tweak some of the money keyword results, other terms look much link Inktomi did after spammers learned how to game their algo.
Good sites are being kept out, or knocked down, while some guy with 100-1000 spam domains is driving his new Porsche to the bank, and flipping Google the finger.
It looks to me like pagerank is being applied to the pages in the theorized secondary index, at least judging from a site I'm watching. New pages are given a fast pass entry into the primary index, although from what I can see, large amounts of new pages will be held up, creating the illusion of a sandbox type affect being applied to them, but it's far more reasonable to assume ongoing capacity issues, and a waiting line for big chunks of new pages on old domains. I saw this first hand recently, there was no doubt that the lag of entering new blocks of pages was not a sandbox, but more of a matter of needing to wait for room to appear.
To the people who say the sandbox doesn't exist because they've managed to crack the algo and get in, that doesn't prove it doesn't exist, it proves that the algo is crackable. All algos are crackable, ask any cracker about that, it's just a question of how hard it is to crack. If you name this particular component of the algo 'sandbox', then state that you've found out how to crack it, this doesn't demonstrate its non-existence, it demonstrates that it's crackable. Everything is crackable.
Good posts scarecrow, and many others in this thread, internetheaven for pointing out that the algo can be cracked, did you pay for that information? My guess is yes.
Could you be a little more specific about the 10 times more SEO work that was required to accomplish this amazing feat?
Specifically, how many backlinks and what type? Do you have a PR 9 site at your disposal or some other advantage that is not available to most? Are you a DMOZ editor?
