About a month ago, we reported that Googlers indeed know if a site is impacted by an algorithm or not - not just if a site is impacted by a manual action.
Today, Google's John Mueller showed that to be the case again when he responded (on Christmas eve) to a webmaster in Google Webmaster Help forums.
He said:
That said, just being crawled faster wouldn't change our algorithm's opinion of your site, and at the moment, it looks like they're really not happy with the quality of the content there.
He is likely references the Panda algorithm which is all about content quality. So this seems to be another example of Google showing they know a site is impacted by an algorithm, which is why I want Google to add this to the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.
That being said, I love John's personal advice, especially the last line:
My personal & direct recommendation here would be to treat this site as a learning experience from a technical point of view, and then to find something that you're absolutely passionate & knowledgeable about and create a website for that instead. Make something that you will want to work on in the long run, make something unique, compelling, and of high quality, something where you're an absolute expert and where you have something to contribute to the web that can't be found anywhere else. This kind of site might be interesting from a technical point of view, but I doubt you dream of "DHGate Coupon Codes Dec 2013," right? :-).
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
