Filters and penalties

Most relevant page, or most relevant UNFILTERED page?

[joeduck]

Could Google's diminishing relevance be due in part to extensive filtering that takes a LOT of pages "out" of the index?

If a page that violates an obscure TOS rule is more relevant should the search engine show that page or favor whiter hat sites that give the user inferior info?

[joergnw10]

I'm no SEO expert, just developed one (my own) site marketing real estate for estate agents in a geographically well confined area (with corresponding keywords targeted). This has been great fun and worked very well (you can probably guess) in Yahoo, MSN..... where we have been no. 1 for a lot of terms for quite some time. In Google we have not been able to climb higher than number 180 for our most targeted keyword. Now I certainly do not have the prettiest or most advanced site, but it is one of the most relevant ones (if only because we have the largest property database for this region). For over a year I have tried to adjust, link, change, 301, tune, un-duplicate...... to get somewhere in Google. Having read this thread I have now decided to just give up until Google comes up with some clear guidelines on what to do or not to do.
The strangest thing is that quite a few clients do actually find us in Google - they dig down 20 pages or so when they could get the same result on the first page in the other search engines.
Sorry for getting on a bit - just had to get this off my chest :-)

[joeduck]

but it is one of the most relevant ones

This is the key question - how many highly relevant pages are filtered out? Seems one solution would be to blast away as now, but have a review process - paid if necessary - to help sites eliminate problems that interfere with proper indexing.

I'm biased since our site is filtered heavily for unclear reasons, but even when I'm searching for general items I'm increasingly finding pages I don't want above those I do. I wonder if *part* of the reason is that the tricky SEO folks have stayed on top of the algo while the regular folks have not?

[reseller]

joergnw10

>>I'm no SEO expert, ...<<

You may wish to consult a SEO specialist to make your site more "Google friendly" ;-)