The search engines have had several years to refine the ways they handle these Super Large Sites, and except for Wikipedia they seem to do a pretty job of protecting the search results from low-quality listings. It’s a pity the search engines don’t want to do anything about Wikipedia, which is one of the worst sources of information on the Web.

Imagine an encyclopedia sitting on your bookshelf where every time you open the page to your favorite article you have no idea of whether the “facts” are what they were the last time you opened it. Would you want the government to manage your information (titles, registrations, tax records, etc.) the same way?

So using that example, maybe there isn’t a two tier metric, and indeed search engines have factored in their ‘overly’ saturated presence (and metrics) to create more interesting SERPs as they would with any other site.

I hear people suggesting that they rank well for every primary keyword in their niche, but maybe search engines would consider penalising a site (regardless of how large they are) when they go beyond this niche and into the realms of mass markets…this appears to be what has happened with Amazon at least in previous years.

After all, the same results for multiple searches around a topic would not necessarily make the user happy, let alone when we are talking about mass markets.

Food for thought, thanks Michael!

Ben

Some Web-aged news sites were also once very dominant. Google and the other search engines responded to complaints about the problem from people like Danny Sullivan and fixed their algorithms.

Although Googlers might object to my calling it a penalty, whatever keeps Amazon from dominating the search listings like it once did is equivalent to a penalty for Amazon.

You and I, had we lost all those search listings, would have considered it a penalty.

I think there are indeed layers of complexity in today’s search algorithms. The search engines must, I am sure, be using metrics the SEO industry has never heard of.

One addition though, there are some heavyweight sites that must be close to that saturation point but whom would not be severely penalised. Using your examples Facebook and Amazon, these must have a very abnormal presence on the web regarding a variety of different saturation metrics.

I suspect that certain brands/companies websites have special treatment. Search engines could not afford to not serve certain results. For instance, in the case of BMW spamming in Germany – they were penalised for a day I think, whereas others are penalised permanently. (I think this was actually for hiden text but the point of special treatment still exists).

It could be inferred that there are two levels of algorithms or at least a trust metric or human intervention (or all of the above) for search engines to adjust to these heavyweight sites.

p.s. I’ve been reading your site more and more lately – really enjoying it! It’s hit my favourites list on my rss feeds, so thanks for putting all this great content out there!!