blackhawk, I think we are in an interesting lull so far as both Google and yahoo are concerned. Yahoo has sent out notice that it is suspending its Inktomi, FAST and Alta Vista paid inclusion programs as of the first, but the email didn’t say what was replacing them. I suppose they will announce that in the next 24 hours or so.
Google’s database, at least in the gambling areas, is dramatically less filled with spam than pre- November 15. They seemed to have a very nice bunch of data on one of their 64.* datacenters shown in the first post in this thread, but then the quality seemed to degrade some when they moved it all over, and also some super-wild fluctuations were noticed when this occured, similar to the colorado gambling forum thing. Those seem to have not stuck though. After a couple months of much better results we seem to be getting a lot more lightweight results, like a lot of be-the-dealer garbage “sites” appearing for most terms. Bottom line, my guess is that what was on the 64 datacenters will probably appear again, but I’m guessing that Google has recognized a problem: when they basically set up a datacenter with data, it was applauded on all the webmaster boards as having great results… but then it got worse once they added “fresh” data. And Google is still of the opinion that “fresh” = good, when it is not. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it is good, and in gambling at least new very likely does NOT mean good. I would guess that this is what Spearmaster is not liking, a sort of revolving door of new sites ranking high then dropping, only to be replaced by another new bit of lint. At least Google doesn’t have the problem with redirect sites that Yahoo does now.
Anyway, I think in both cases, today doesn’t matter. We are going to see significant changes in both soon. Google’s pagerank will probably update in the next day or so, then a few days after that I’d expect to see a significant change.