I realize I tend to operate off of a vocabulary separate from what most others would consider common, such as with my assignment of the term String Derivatives to identify a sophisticated and intricate series of theories strung together sometimes at a moment's notice to create/stall movement of a string in an online setting.
With debates raging through the forums surrounding the how's and how not to's of mastering the web from an indexing perspective, it is not uncommon for chunks of indexed materials to drop out of sight of the end-user, as is demonstrated through the production of a series of Search Engine Index Snapshots (SEIS), such as what is presented here in the 4th V Decision Tree.
The simplistic question as to how someone's sight somehow shifted in the rankings for no clear reason (or maybe the reason is of an obvious construct) can be temporarily reduced to a result that showed up on the January 26, 2012 at approximately 11:0 p.m. snapshot.
Basically, a chunk of the Google index dropped out of end-user sight and it wasn't a small chunk in relation to totals provided by the two other search engine indexes. What had originally been sighted at 918,000 pages in other snapshots dramatically dropped to 289,000, thereby creating a 7,000 difference between the lowest and highest results out of all 3 indexes.
Rather than traveling a path to explore the impact and influences of the 7,000 difference between the 3 major search engine indexes (not very common), it is the idea of 629,000 slots disappearing from any index that I believe can help dispel a myth or two surrounding dumping
Let's say you have a site competing in the megaupload marketplace. Prior to this 6-digit drop in page count, you were ranking somewhere within the Top 300. For this demonstration, it is within reason to assume this bulk reduction in total page counts in the Google index is going to influence your rankings in some manner.
Let's say 50 or 150 of the slots that disappeared were within the Top 200. You're going to significantly move up the results list, thereby alluding to some measure of page ranking playing the leading role in such a determination. You could land yourself in the Top 100 or hover somewhere between the Top 100 and 300 list results.
Now what goes into this addition and subtraction of content in any index is anybody's guessing game. The drop could have been caused by an end-user turning off a major broadcasting source and Google catching up to its absence. There could have been discovery of template criteria and critique that triggered a de-listing of the content. Someone could have dumped a bunch of links attached to an affiliate program. The list goes on and on, but the focus is to help a webmaster gain better insight and sense as to just how much automated content versus hand-crafted content might be influencing the rankings. Million page sites can go live in a heartbeat and one page can outpace all other pages in the index.
Therefore, this method of trend analysis is not intended to provide precision accuracy to explain individual site movement, rather it is designed to suggest a few starting points to consider when contemplating competition using any string derivative, such as volatility issues surrounding strings put into play for any reason.
Google isn't the only index dumped on by end-users and Google isn't the only index to dump content from the public viewing results collection they provide end-users, but this particular dump seemed like as good as any of a demonstration why auto-assigning blame and responsibility solely on the shoulders of a search engine index remains a little odd when it is traditionally an end-user that initiates a broadcast of any kind in the first place.
Perhaps another headline for this would be "6-digit Entry Breakout Causes Significantly Different Megaupload Roster Breakdown."
Now whether or not an end-user had permission to put up the content or not is a whole different storyline with an entirely different reason to view an artist being down in the dumps regarding the current emotional currents coursing throughout the entire industry and beyond.
Another time, perhaps.
The 4th Tab Version for The 2011-2012 V Decision Tree