When i'm trying to figure out a new ranking algo, I look at some keywords that are reletively immune from spammers. One I look at, which also has relevance for me, is "vBulletin" - Who the hell is gonna spam that and why? This shows Google is a mess IMO. There are 4 sites in the top 10 that are really relevant to vBulletin. Of the others - 3, although "about" vBulletin - contain virtually nothing. And 3 are forums that are running on vBulletin, but have nothing to do with the topic. I can name a number of sites that were once in the top 10 - which are no longer - that were specifically about vBulletin.
check this thread for more people being affected by this... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=101563
One of my site was affected by Big Daddy, Thanks God for this new update. My hot key words again at same position.
When I search for my domain name I see a lot of old pages in the results and if I look at the Cache it has this date: retrieved on Aug 14, 2005 13:36:51 GMT WTF??? Old crap again
This thread inspired me to research this further and write an article... Google is Broken - And I think I know how...
I had one site that escaped the sandbox this week. Nowhere to 193. Looks like I've got work to do. Another escaped to debut at 28.
I had a new site, just over a month old jumped into the top 100 for a very competitive term in Google, it hung around for a couple of days and then vanished. It's either that the update hasn't spread to all the datacentes yet, or it's been rolled back. I don't think this one is going to settle for a while.