Google Must Prioritize Filtering

My niche - nothing ever changes

[burcot]

I have read thousands of posts covering 100s of topics at WebmasterWorld.
The common theme is - if you do this, or don't do that, your site will implode and nobody will ever find you again through natural search (google)

I realise that my experience is extremly limited but in the last 2 years i have followed (to the point of obsession) the serps in my industry. Here are my observations.

1.All the top 20 sites are still there Some don't even redirect http to www

2.No site ever moves more than a couple of places during an update/data push

3.Interlinking and hidden text do not seem to affect any of the leading players.

4.Whoever has the most agressive (current) link building campaign climbs a couple of slots.

5.The theme of backlinks doesn't seem to influence serps at all. if you gain a link with anchor = "widgets" from site: widgets.com, it won't compete with a link from oppositeofwidgets.com with anchor = **** assuming the site has trust.

Does Google filter and adjust results based on topic?

[sonjay]

In one of the industries I've been focusing on the past couple of years, the situation is exactly as you describe. All 5 of your observations are spot-on, and nothing that's said about the algorithms or filters or penalties or anything seems to be true in this particular market.

In other areas, I see search results change periodically, sites move up or down, new sites appear. But in this one particular area, the top 20 (heck, probably the 50) seem to have an eternal lock on their positions.

[outland88]

I’ve always though Google maintained its trust and reliability with the public, now popularly called Trust Rank, by manually fixing the ranked results in many areas. They know they can’t control the spamming. In other words most web sites will be subjected to an array of filters and possible penalties while some sites aren’t. I also believe some areas go totally untouched by this while the rules may vary with many categories.