tedster - 3:36 am on Jun 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

One of the oddest things I've seen in the recent SERPs -- and I've now heard three other reports on this kind of thing -- is the occasional clustering and indenting of two different domains.

#1) In one case, example.com was clustered with example.de -- its translated content.

#2) In another case, the two domains were only related by topic. Matt Cutts blog was clustered and indented under another SEO blog of unrelated ownership. This happened twice, with Matt's blog clustered under two different domains that discuss him.

#3) A third and possibly related oddity I'll call the case of example.com and ex-ample.org.

Example.com has been ranking from number #9 to #12 for several years. The domain was a partial dupe of ex-ample.org, a domain that never ranked above page 12 in its 5 year history. After two frustrating years, the owner pared that content down to a smaller amount of material, and he launched that near duplicate site as example.com. The content ranked much better in the more lightweight form, as i said, hovering around #9 to #12. But the owner left the old, fatter domain live.

All of a sudden, for a few days earlier this week, ex-ample.og blinked in replacing it's lighter weight duplicate, then in about 36 hours, the SERPs reverted.