Relevance

• Posted by B Jones on October 12th, 2005 - Comment on this Post »

Do Google’s filters have a negative effect on the relevance of their results?

I did a search for [matt cutts] in the big 3. I think we all know which site we would expect to come up first in that search. MSN and Yahoo both bring up Matt Cutts’ new blog in the number 1 position, but Google lists Cutts’ old UNC site as #1, and the new blog comes in at #2. www.cs.unc.edu/~cutts/ even though the new blog site has more than 20x more backlinks right now.

So what factors would cause the #1 site, www.cs.unc.edu/~cutts/ to be #1 in Google even though there are currently way less links pointing at the site?

Now currently, [Matt Cutts] isn’t really a competitive search, but I believe this is evidence of the Google Sandbox.

There is definitely some filter (’the sandbox’) holding this site down at number 2.

2 possible factors:
1. The age of the site.
2. The age of the links pointing at the site, in other words, “How long have those 1200+ links been pointing to the new site?”

Again, I know that the differnce between #1 and #2 isn’t huge, but I think this effect is probably much more pronounced when the keyword in question is actually a competitive one.

* Used Yahoo because they show the most accurate number of backlinks.

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