Does anyone have a handle yet on what quality signals Google are using or may be using to rank sites? I can't get my head round this from my fairly wide sample of sites.
I have very odd results.
For testing on a throwaway domain I have 25 identical spam pages just with keyword changed, 6 rank really well still the others do not rank at all! None of these pages have external links to them and both have equal amounts of internal links.
Two quality sites for different towns in the same region, one has good search traffic and very strong positions the other just isn't listed in SERPS. Both have the same type of information, a map, history, lists of hotels, places to visit etc... and all on site optimisation is identical. The design and layout of both sites is identical. The ranking site is much much older than the non listed site.
It just seems pretty random to me! I must admit that some sheer spammy auto generated drivel is ranking better now than it every has before! This is just plain wrong!
I'm seeing really ugly hard to read and navigate sites dominating some niches. I'm noticing some formerly strong sites suddenly missing or slipping down.
