tedster - 4:57 am on Dec 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

Do you agree with my theory that the six position could be a safety net tedster?

It's worth keeping in mind. The idea that clustered results end up a 6+7 is only the natural result of the way clustering works - any two results from the same domain that occur on the same page of results will always cluster. It's a last minute action applied to the rough results.

I keep going back to an older theory I had but could never pin down about Google actions to enforce a specific position - in this case a ceiling rather than a safety net. There has long seemed to be a kind of barrier for going from #11 to #10. It just seems to take something more than any other upward shift of one single position.

I think Google is becoming ever more proactive in crafting the first page of results, and this position #6 sticky spot may be yet another action in that direction. It seems to me that "universal search" may require this, and even more, may be providing the infrastructure needed to play around with "forced positions".

And speaking of universal search, I noticed in December that the number images on the SERP really fell off. YouTube videos still have a "plus box" to click, but not a still image very often.

So, I'm conjecturing here, maybe these new "forced to #6" results are those previous #1 results that haven't been performing as well - on click throughs and click backs - as some expected norm would predict. So no matter what Google's relevance algo says the ranking should be, these urls get time down the ladder to see if there's a better candidate already on the page for making Google's users happier.

Also, some reports came in that the #6 position would appear on google.com but on aol.com, the url would still be #1. However, all those examples went away and aol.com is now in line with google.com, except of course the total number of results is lower, since aol apparently doesn't get the supplemental database.

There are always lots of other ranking shifts at any time - but this one is so specific, going from a #1 to #6, that I'm hoping we can come up with something useful here. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to get Google's click through and click back data, so I can't quite see how to test my latest idea.