What is Google on about?

[zerotrouble]

I have no idea what these matt butts and web spam team are onto at the moment.

I've got backlinks built to my bonus page and on searching "xyz bonus" it shows my xyz review page (which has NO external backlinks) somewhere on 3rd-4th page and the bonus page which should be there is like 100 places away.

A casino site which I recently made, I believe has been 'sandboxed' to 40th page. Domain is a keyword domain and has <500,000 search results, whereas my other non-gambling sites with keyword domains rank in top 10 in 20+ million results (without any backlinks)

Has anyone been experiencing the sandbox effect with gambling sites lately?

[OPC]

I've noticed search results have changed drastically this week for me. I'm working on figuring out why... Weird pages showing where I'd never expect them, pages I expect to show up somewhere failing to appear... I do not believe it to be sandbox related.

[Lenny]

Ive noticed every new site i put up ranks well after about a week , for about 5-7 days. Then it just drops off completly for the next 6 months.

Think with new site you have to put them up, build a few links, then forget about them for a while.

[Ozpoker]

google ranks for the one term are dancing wildly atm - the spammiest of sites are jumping in to top #5 and then back to #100+ and back again

google serps must be using diff. servers depending on when you poll then and where your from and thats the only explanation I can make.

I've even seen diff. results served to a diff. people at the same time in the same country but from a diff. state using the same non-localised keyword term - if you can make sense of that your better than me.

[OPC]

My current suspicion is that backlinks from facebook specifically are being more heavily valued, which is pushing some sites up for various search terms, and down for others. I also suspect that given the extremely drastic change in search results, the volume is going to be turned down quite a bit on such backlinks sooner rather than later.

[MJ]

That's an interesting theory, while my ranks are where they should be for the effort I've put into them, I am seeing more and more absolutely irrelevant links in the search lately.

[Michael Martinez]

Google tweaks its algorithms on a weekly basis. They may simply be experimenting with some relevance changes. BING appears to have them worried (which it should) so perhaps they're trying a few more radical tweaks than usual.

I haven't really seen much churn in the bellwether queries I monitor, but they are not gambling related.

It's also possible that Google is only tweaking relevance for gambling-related queries.

[MAC]

May be is now time for google.es

I was pulled from #7 (sometimes #3) to #20+ for keyword "free poker" in spanish (poker gratis)

I've been following this results for long and now I see double number of websites in top10 with poker gratis in their domain, same more or less than I see at bing.

Hope to see mine on top10

[Giorgio]

I've noticed search results have changed drastically

Ditto