Miamacs - 11:02 am on Apr 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

I still think that IF it's almost like a sitewide penalty, the problematic phrases are used sitewide as well. Perhaps in the navigation. Or in the TITLE / boilerplates of the pages. But essentially all this is applied to individual pages.

There are a lot of words Google won't match up as being a legit addition to your theme. The higher you can climb with them, the harder you fall if their new reranking algo finds you unacceptable ( sometimes for no good reason ).

...

Recently I found an interesting and somewhat worrying way to test things.

Typed in the money phrase that the page is penalized for, but used a typo ( in the word that requires higher trust ). ie. california wiedgts.

Google not only deducted that I'm probably looking for the money phrase, highlighted the word as if I didn't make the typo, but also didn't even return ANY sites with the typo in it. Neither did it ask whether I'm actually looking for widgets instead of wiedgts. Results were more or less the same as if I made the query normally.

But...

It forgot to apply the on the fly reranking to the SERPs.
The page was where I'd expect it to be without the penalty.

Not sure if it's gonna work today, but I had some fun with it yesterday.

[edited by: Miamacs at 11:03 am (utc) on April 14, 2007]