Google in permanent Freshbot state?

[Chelsea]

Many of us remember the halcyon days when the Google SERPs were fairly static, but every now and then an unfamiliar, usually low PR, site would pop up with a high rank amongst them, stay for a few days, and then drop to its natural position. A so called 'fresh' site.

I guess the theory is they were given the benefit of the doubt on first crawl, and given a nice boost until Google could rank them properly.

Looking at the SERPs the other day, it struck me that the SERPs now look as if they are entirely populated by fresh-type pages.

Is it possible Google is having difficulty with the correct ranking of pages?

[ciml]

I don't see a difficulty as such, more a victory for Google in their stated aim to get a fresher index.

Google doesn't exist to promote our sites, but to help people find sites related to their search.

[Chelsea]

Hi CIML,

A couple of qualifications over my original post: the 'fresh' look isn't the case in all SERPs. But in some sectors many sites look like the 'fresh' sites of old. That is: low PR, marginally on topic, and perhaps undeserving of such a high rank.

My suggestion is essentially that Google is having ranking problems - for whatever reason.

I've made a few changes to my sites, and they still get this 'fresh' boost - they start off on the first page, and are then relegated to page 2/3 after a day or so.

Are we looking at a continuous flux of 'fresh' sites?

Perhaps all the changes to pages now being made by frantic webmasters are overwhelming the Google ranking system?

Or is the Google ranking system bust? Or now unable to keep up with the pace of change?

edits: a few additions, apologies.

[ciml]

I think we've had enough time now since the Florida update to discount the 'ranking problems' idea. Some webmasters have problems staying as high as they want to be in Google, but that isn't a Google problem as such. Imagine being Google's webmaster - getting beaten by Lycos for 'search engine' must be embarrasing...

> Perhaps all the changes to pages now being made by frantic webmasters are overwhelming the Google ranking system?

That seems unlikely, the small minority of webmasters who've evern heard of the Florida update control some very small proportion of the billions of pages in Google - and most of us haven't made frantic changes anyway.

[storevalley]

Imagine being Google's webmaster - getting beaten by Lycos for 'search engine' must be embarrasing...

And in your own SERPs at that!

Perhaps Google is just trying to show how fair their new algorithm is :)