kdobson99 - 3:21 pm on Jan 20, 2007 (gmt 0)

I don't think that every site having 2 pages rank for the same search term are affected this way, but I do think that something along these lines is causing the issue.

In my case, the person with the historic position 1 still holds the number 1 result, but with a different page than historically been there. The old one is down at 950.

I don't think this is across the board.... I just think it has something to do with google having a hard time IN CERTAIN INSTANCES determining which to choose, and for some reason tosses the old one down to the 900's.

I think the question we should be asking is simply, "Is there anything about my site that would make it appear that another page deserves to rank for the same query". I'm not sure that this has to be something we recently did to our sites, rather than simply a problem of recent vintage in google's ability to determine the proper page to rank.

In my case, I think google's logic in ranking my pages would sound like this: "For this query, the site has two pages returned in the result set (1,000 results) to be ranked. Historically, page A should be ranked number 5, but it looks like the site is saying that page B is more relevant to the query, thus we will push page A down to the bottom, and let page B assume it's normal algo calculated rank (result 100)."

Could be way off base on this whole thing, but that's the best I can come up with at the moment.