It doesn‘t take much to reach the tipping

Everyone‘s been endlessly debating the is there/is there not a Google Sandbox debate, and Matt‘s cleared things up with a few hints there is the remote possibility that there might be something that is vaguely sandbox-like-ish. Danny Sullivan steps up to the plate and calls a spade a spade in a comment on Search Engine Watch thread Is There A Google Sandbox? As it happens, I was at a friend‘s house yesterday who has a completely new site, only a month and a half old. He was wondering why another site was outranking him. I‘m probably going to go into detail about what I found, but fair to say, there was a sandbox effect for everything I could see. If ranked for some terms but wouldn‘t rank for other ones that it absolutely, positively should have -- given the other terms it was doing well for.

The ODP puts out an annual report on growth and other statistics. Some of the stats: Robozilla was ran deeply through DMOZ twice last year. The number of listings in the directory grew 5% last year. Active editor accounts on 1 January 2005: ~8,000 New editors accepted in 2005: 4,776 Active editor accounts on 31 December 2005: ~ 7,744 That is some SERIOUS editor churn going on there!

I think it is. Over the last year and a half Yahoo! have well and truly won the hearts and minds of the blogging and tech community - no small feat, and very, very important. Yet much of that achievment, perhaps all of it, can be directly attributed to the Y! Search team - they get it, 100% However, there‘s a large disconnect between Y!Search and the rest of Y! - while the Search team is busy producing buzzworthy products and services, dressed in black and wearing shades in the blogosphere, other Y! departments have been undermining all that hard work with stupid, nonsensical moves.

It doesn‘t take much to reach the tipping point on reputation, and i think although unrelated to recent spyware scandals, the Chinese journo case may have pushed them over it. Sad, because as noted in the comments, it‘s not as if they had much choice but to comply with local laws. It has however taken the momentum of ill will built up with previous stupid PR moves and sent them screaming over edge. Mike at Techdirt has a great wow arena guide roundup of recent PR atrocities in "