Stark - 2:22 pm on Aug 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Well, here are my experiences...

I have two websites relating to a sport. One site focusses on news relating to players in the sport, and the other focusses on statistics relating to the very same players.

Both sites used to rank well for searches of player names (especially the less famous players) and regularly ranked in the top 5. This is really almost entirely off the strength of internal anchor text as these pages don't get inbounds from outside the site generally.

In addition, each stats page for a player links to the news page, and vice versa.

Both sites are served on the same server and same IP.

Now, the stats site doesn't feature at all when searching for player pages, but the news site is as good if not better than ever.

Both have similar on-page optimisation, e.g. h1, a mention in bold etc. and both have very similar internal linking strucutre. The stats site homepage is PR6 with a dmoz link, and the news site has no dmoz link and the home page is PR5.

I can understand the loss of position on the stats pages if something has changed (not that I'm happy of course) but it's strange that it didn't equally affect the news site given the similarites in structure.

Keep in mind the content on the pages is totally different and there is no question of a duplicate content filter.

These pages are absolutely nowhere near travel of course.

I personally lean towards some sort of change to the value of internal anchor text rather than keyword density, but it's clearly nothing too simple.