Forum Moderators: open
An example of this is a site with the following content:
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** OUR NEW SITE NOW ONLINE! **
** http://searchword1-searchword2-searchword3.com/ ** (font size 4)
Just click the URL to see the new searchword1-searchword2-searchword3 portal!
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As you would expect, searchword1-searchword2-searchword3 appear in the <title> and Blind Freddy can see the connection between <title>, the anchor text link and that one line of text.
However, the site is totally useless to the visitor who gets offered it as a #1 result. It simply has nothing in it by way of content, yet outranks sites with lots of content. A temporary blip in the results I can understand but that usually gets sorted out in a later update. No so in this case.
Links? Google shows 14 with a mix of mostly PR4, some 5, a 6 and a 7. Many off-topic.
Competitive area? Very much so, there are lots of competeting sites for this term.
I keep reading that content is king... so why am I not convinced?
If a site is legitimately moving to a new domain, it could create a "we've moved" notice page, as you describe. This page would have very little content, but it still may rank highly in Google, due to historical backlinks, and the on-page factors (title, description, on-page text, image-alts, etc.). I don't think any of us have a problem with this situation, although a permanent redirect from the old site to the new domain would be better for users, and less spammy.
What austtr and others are concerned with are single-page sites that pose as site-redirect notice pages, but are actually doorway pages or an affiliate link. These pages are not at the url of a former homepage for a real website... they are new domains created in order to spam google. It bugs us that some webmasters manage to get to the top of the SERPs in 20 words or less!
Because GG could merely claiming that Google is going through a transitional phase when in fact he knows they are broken at the moment, and is saying this just for public relations purposes. Not that I am saying I necessarily believe this is the case. However, this is logically possible.
If Google is temporarily "broken" due to this being a transitional perion, then focusing on these page content issues is pointless at this moment. The time to analyze in that case would be when the transition is over. Only if the site mentioned by the original poster is #1 because this is the way Google wants it should people alter page content, etc.
I also have an annoying pesk of a competitor that while their main index page *looks* like a simple "we have moved domains .. click here to proceed" there is also a wopping great big mirror site behind it (with every page indexed in google and working for it), so have you all checked to see what else might be on the domain in question?
