A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...
I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address.
Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?).
So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda.
But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).
My search terms were:
WQP8 9001 user guide
WQP8 9001 manualOff-topic, but I've always thought this is the main reason Google Blog Search isn't very good. In the quest to make an all-algorithm blog search, Google sacrificed having one at all. If they had simple restricted the search to blogspot.com, wordpress.com, and typepad.com, and applied the normal spam filters, it could have been pretty good!
(http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/110081/question-on-s...)
If Google is blocking a site would that affect their ranking?
It'd be interesting to know.
>Both Stack Overflow and The Hyphenated Site (EE) sites are affected, EE in fact goes way down and Super User also notices a drop after reaching a record in the same time while Stack Overflow goes sharply down
Obviously, Alexa sucks, and all web stats suck.
So Google is a long way from achieving their goal while good sites get punished.