steveb - 4:21 pm on Jun 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

"they also didn't suggest it was a duplicate problem."

Duplicate content seems to be one of the key factors. Google is having all sorts of problems with mysite.com versus www.mysite.com and with newhoo.com versus dmoz.org. I can't believe anybody takes that H1 tag stuff seriously. That obviously isn't involved as hardly anybody is effected by it, and many sites rank fine using it. Focus on what is actually going on here. When google has a choice between two pages, like identical newhoo and dmoz ones, it simply screws up which one to choose *lot of the time*. It's got nothing to do with tags or optimization.