kdobson99 - 6:11 pm on Jan 15, 2007 (gmt 0)

Boy I wish we could post URL's here... not of my site, but of an example site that is getting hit... So here I will go with the "widgets" thing...

The General Motors niche homepage had historically ranked top 10 or so for a search for "buy red widget" and related searches. Frankly, it deserves to be there. Now the following results:
"Red Widget" - End of Results, formerly top 20
"buy red widget" - Top 10
"buy red widgets" - End of Results, formerly top 20
"buy 'red synonym' widget" - End of Results (where google previously allowed them to rank for an obvious synonym of "red" without any on page text of the synonym.
"'red synonym' widget" - Top 10

Again, this is all for the same homepage. In this instance the plural invokes the "penalty" and the singular still places top 10 results. Keyword "Buy Red Widget" appears exactly once on the page... no other instance of "red", "widget", or "buy" on the page. No affiliate links etc.

I have other examples of sites that rank for one variation of essentially the same search and used to rank for a second variation, and now are down at the bottom for the second variation.

For those of you who track competitors search positions daily... from early January to now, check which sites have left the top 20 for your most competitive terms... then check the bottom results (they will probably be there)... Then look at similar searches with slight variations (plural, synonym) and see if the same page still ranks for slight variations.