Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
During the transition from the old rank to the target rank, the transition rank might cause:
a time-based delay response,
a negative response,
a random response, and/or
an unexpected response
If these transitional ranking shifts are followed by what looks like a responsive action from the website, the URL or website which was previously only SUSPECTED as spam, might now be positively tagged as spam.
It seems rather strange that the long term rank will depend on the actions (or lack thereof) of a third party - not really what you'd think linguistics and computer science PhDs would come up with.
I sort of like seeing some validation from Google for things that I've been observing.
Lately Google seems to be making an assumption that any SEOed site is spam. This is a false asuumption.
That is the very definition of a witch hunt.
The systems and methods may also observe spammers’ reactions to rank changes caused by the rank transition function to identify documents that are actively being manipulated. This assists in the identification of rank-modifying spammers.
As shown in FIG. 6, the rank of a document slowly responds to a positive change in its link-based information. After a period of time, the document's rank might settle in on its new steady state (target) value. The time line shown in FIG. 6 may be represented in days in one implementation consistent with the principles of the invention. In other words, it might take approximately 70 days for a change in a document's link-based information to change the rank of the document to its steady state (target) value (e.g., 1.0 in FIG. 6).
As shown in FIG. 7, the rank of a document may initially decrease in response to a positive change in its link-based information. After a period of time, the document's rank might rise to its new steady state (target) value. Like FIG. 6, the time line shown in FIG. 7 may be represented in days in one implementation consistent with the principles of the invention. In other words, the document's rank may decrease for a period of approximately 20 days before settling in on its new steady state (target) value (e.g., 1.0 in FIG. 7) in approximately 70 days after a positive change in its link-based information.
In addition, or alternatively, search engine 125 may monitor the ranks of documents over time to detect sudden spikes in the ranks of the documents. A spike may indicate either a topical phenomenon (e.g., a hot topic) or an attempt to spam search engine 125 by, for example, trading or purchasing links. Search engine 125 may take measures to prevent spam attempts by, for example, employing hysteresis to allow a rank to grow at a certain rate. In another implementation, the rank for a given document may be allowed a certain maximum threshold of growth over a predefined window of time. As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a spam document, search engine 125 may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that spam documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news. Any or a combination of these techniques may be used to curtail spamming attempts.
What matters most is my client sites and they do rank well because of all the on page SEO that I do (without mention of the term SEO of course because it's not their field). With the exception of 1 four year old site the others barely have a few inbound links yet dominate first page.
but sir, isn't that a gathering of white hats?
Lately Google seems to be making an assumption that any SEOed site is spam. This is a false asuumption.
Well, some of us have been enjoying this "new" activity for a while an posting about it
Naturally no one believes it till G fesses up !
This changes completely how sites are updated.
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:26 pm (utc) on Aug 19, 2012]
[edited by: tedster at 7:30 pm (utc) on Aug 19, 2012]
