I don't like the idea. So what if there's an unfair judgment given to a particular site due to the manual review process?
Seen that happen, babies getting tossed with the bath water. It's also possible to get other people babies tossed with the bath water (long gone are the days site A cannot effect site B). I done it about 2 weeks ago as a proof of concept.
Yes link manipulation, plus cloaked pages on another domain redirecting to the good domain. The domain with the cloaked pages got completely de-indexed, and the good domain remain indexed but completely sunk for all it's keywords. It's back in the 50's for a "sitename.com exact page title" query.
Is anyone really surprised of the thought that Google is doing this. I've been 99% sure that this has been happening for years for major traffic keywords. I'm not sure if they actually say, "these guys should be #1 ,#2, etc..." but I'm sure being an 'authority' website gives you an EXTREME manual scoring bump which in turn effects the search results.
Same owner yes (me) but the domains had different Whois, and were on different servers & nameservers so for all Google knows they could of belonged to different people. They didn't use Analytics or Adsense either. The "good" site i targeted was xHTML Strict and Valid CSS, all original content, well optimized and no outbound dofollow links so it had zero reason to be penalized... But it did, and the penalization coincided with the bad links and cloaked pages pointing at it and the actual domain doing the cloaking being de-indexed.
I have noticed manual rating on my keyword about 12 months ago. Sites with google add sense have been given push and it is impossible to overtake them. It looks that add sense within website is more important than original, quality content. And just recently I have noticed that sites with add sense are given further boost as in seach results pictures are inserted after the sites with add sense pushing further down websites without add sense.
Well, Google has been doing this for awhile now with their 1st page results. This is nothing new. This can only be a good thing. No more spam ranking above me. No more crap sites ranking above me. Finally, people will be forced to make quality websites.
Ouch that is (maybe not so) weird. So a power move can in fact take down another site? May i ask where the penalization put the site?
I guess the easiest way to put irrelevant stuff on the front page is to buy some adwords Google will still aprove as long as u pay enough
Google can do what it wants regarding Google, just like you can with your sites...so what's not right?
Searching for "domain.com title of a page" it's back in the #50's from just 100 or so results, so it's heavily penalized considering the URL's are domain.com/title-of-a-page which is a perfect match for the query as the whole URL is bold in the SERP's.
May be bacause Google is also the owner of Adwords and Adsense services. More displayed ads means more $$$ for them.
Know what? Starting a test today Let's see if i can move some pieces up and down... Makes no sense at all