I have been trying to figure out why my new sites have been doing awesome in MSN but nowhere in Google. Of course, you have the dreaded "sandbox". The sandbox is no longer a mystery. It appears that Google may be looking at quite a few specific criteria. The Google patent document refers to longevity of sites. http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 It appears that they're number one goal is to get rid of spam at the risk of their search results being stale (made up of mostly old sites).
Yeah, your sites rank high in MSN simply because of anchor text, not because there ISN'T a sandbox on MSN. But yeah, Google does seem to favor older sites as the patent says.
I read that patent document as something totally different. All it says is that they may consider the history of a page when ranking it. This may mean that they might rank a page higher if it has been updated regularly while maintaining a theme, or perhaps they might rank it lower if it hasn't changed in 5 years. It doesn't actualy say whether history works in favour of the page, just that it could be taken into account. Imagine a magazine-style website's front page that continually features new articles. It would make sense to rank that page higher for a term like 'travel' if it has always been highly relevant to that term. On the flipside, it wouldn't make as much sense to rank a page highly for 'travel' if only the latest article is relevant to travel. Seems like a good idea to me. Or so I see it anyway.
I don't know about the age of a site I have a few sites that are 3-4 months old that have been steadily gaining speed and are on page one for many not so competitive item specific terms. I just did a search on Google for a term - a specific product, I used to get more traffic for and found 2 pages of ebay spam on throw away domains that I've never seen before. This term is on my oldest commercial site which is 1.5 years old. So whether Google has implemented this is anyones guess.
One of my sites just turned a year old this past week. I don't think a it's coincidence that it's finally ranking higher in google than it had been.
I wish it were that easy. Given enough time, I think we could figure out that 2 sentence abstract. Its the 14,000 word document that will take a bit more time.
Actually, on reading some of the rest of the document (can't be bothered with the whole thing), I still think my original post makes sense, although I concede that this patent also suggests that age alone can have an effect. Interestingly, it also seems to point out that the amount of times a link is clicked would have a bearing on 'stale' results. Either way, just because they have a patent on something, it doesn't mean that they will actually use it.
Yes the debate is ongoing I believe they have implimented alot of this some time before the patent became public knowlegde. There's another thread here that goes in depth http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=12518&highlight=google+patent I thought it was summed up quite nicely here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=132997&postcount=12
I'm not sure why this is such a big deal to everyone. Site longevity is simply one of the factors. You can't just assume it's your site's lifespan compared to others' that has you lower in google - it could be a number of other things. Since site age is one thing you can only control with patience I'd say start worrying about the other things because this one will fix itself over time
Yikes - I'm cross eyed from that doc. Must be that I'm up too late, but it appeared that there were some repetitive clauses. I plan on printing it tomorrow and digesting line by line throughout the day. Maybe something will spark.
What about buying an old domain which is out of the sandbox already and slowly changing the content in it to my own? do you think that would help a site, considering the time factor?
I have a feeling that they sandboxed sites that were created after a certain date. My main site was created June 2004 and its been sandboxed with Jagger1. If Jagger2 and Jagger3 don't help it, I may have to move it to a domain that is not hit as hard.