Not sure how everyone didnt already know this. Don't you think its crazy that for example Barrack Obamas website somehow gets #1 when it has no domain age and there cant possible be the BEST SEO working for them.
I believe that G has been manually editing for some time. No proof though. I believe that they should to guarantee the quality of their product/service.
And we, webmasters, help them every day: Analytics Google Toolbar Adsense Adwords G Base and the list goes on.... They have all the data they need about a site.
If that is the case, then search engine optimization is simply irrelevant these days. Is Google desperate? They should stick to its old rules. Human editing is subjective. Well, we may start befriending editors at Google.
It's remarkable to see how many people who think Google hand stacking the results is a far out notion. Quality of results is at the core of what made Google leaders in search, there's billions of dollars riding on it, shareholders to please and competition wanting to take their spot. If people move to another engine, they will slowly start using the other engines related offerings like email, advertising, analytics, toolbars etc. If you could hand manipulate the one thing that makes you leader in your field and earn you billions would you? If you say no, i say liar of course you would. But.. Over the past 6 months with the sinking Goog stock, they are desperate to provide more return on investors money and Google's bottom line. How do you do that? Inflate earnings, so you could illegally stack the books "or" stack the engine in favor of your own commercial interests while trying to keep things relevant enough to satisfy the end user. Sure Google has slashed staff, killed publisher Xmas gifts, reduced hours on the free cafeteria, axed Lively and so on to reduce costs but Ads/Search is a billion dollar piggy bank (97% of their revenue) so you don't think they have their mitts in it stacking it in their favor?
google is not able to review each and every site and search queries. But google is best than the rest
I guess this is the key. If you believe Google manually edits the search rankings to boost or depress particular sites, do you have any firm proof? The problem is, it's not "one thing". How many searches does Google get every day, and how many sites are returned in the results for those searches? Google employees have clearly stated that the reason they DON'T hand edit search rankings is because the process would be completely unmanageable. The huge volumes of data involved, and the fact that site contents change day by day, would make it impossible to maintain any such system. Automated solutions are the only sensible way forward when dealing with such huge data volumes. ... which is why they don't manually tweak search rank positions. Howard
Banning a site is one thing and influencing the SERP is a different game altogether. SERP rankings are automated based on algorithm but that doesn't mean they have not left a few parameters in their program to influence the calculation of SERP score of each site. They can certainly influence the search engine ranking say for e.g the way you can move a site ranking in your browser and they must be collecting this data like how much time people spend on a particular site does influence site's ranking so obviously they must have few parameters say x,y,z... that they can tweak from 1 to 1000 or something like that. I agree with lots of adsense sites coming up higher with no content including pages from digg(personal experience) , adsense one page website which have no content but still come front page.
After all it all boils down to one thing that drives businesses and that is profit. Lets not forget they are no charity .
Great to see a good debate on here. I firmly believe they hand edit the big keywords. Important changes happen in the world that need to be reported quicker than a site could become SEO'ed either naturally or with help of an SEO.