Based on my communications with several folks and our observations on those sites whose rankings we monitor, it would appear that sometime late last week (or over the weekend) Google shifted around some rankings. Our best guess as to what happened:
- Global popularity/authority of a domain was slightly devalued when calculating rankings of deep, internal pages (and/or)
- Deep links from external sites to deep content pages is now slightly more valuable
I don't like to make guesses like this without significant evidence, but at this point, I feel fairly comfortable making this assertion. We've seen traffic to large "Wikipedia" style content drop off a bit while more targeted, link heavy pages on domains with a less authoritative profile have gained in both rankings and traffic.
For most SEOs, this is a good thing. For those of us who consult with some of the web's content behemoths, the picture is not as overwhelmingly positive.
Same thing here, our website, www.nvisolutions.com, suffered from it as most of our inbound links were targeted mainly to our main page since we plan on changing many URLs and the website content in the near future. In all cases, I did see, early in April, a backlink update of all the sites we monitor, similar to the ones we've noticed early in February 2006 and early in Novembre 2006.
Cheers :D
I was just about to disagree with you on #1 as I'm still encountering a bunch of doorway pages in some of the hyper-competitive industries I monitor, but lo and behold my and only my computer here at the office is showing something different now that meets what you're describing...complete with the little triangle "Click for more information" on those sites that apparently setup spammy sitemaps [not all did the sitemaps, but most apparently].
The results overall are a bit more relevant than before, and I think the "click here" feature is pretty neat, though limiting it to only those sites that use the G sitemap will ultimately prove to be the undoing (as all listings will fill it up with as much garbage as possible).
I've been seeing #2 for several sites that I monitor. Time to work on those deep links.