tedster - 12:53 pm on Aug 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks for that summary, Shaddows - you put many pieces together into a bigger picture that does line up with a lot that I've seen.

There's one type of yo-yo that I still ponder - it's one of the first sites I ever saw with a yo-yo. This site showed regular cycling for just one (pretty major) 2-word phrase. The URL was a home page that had been at least PR7 for quite a few years. This site also had solid rankings and great traffic for some other big keywords. And yet for this particular phrase only, there was a yo-yo.

So that experience makes me wonder about a trust partition ALONE being a cause. There also seems to be a query-related factor involved, and the site seems to have plenty of trust otherwise.

Pages nearly-good enough to rank page1 are given an opportunity

And when this type of url cycles off page 1, its position is often (maybe always) replaced by a universal search result. When the url does appear on page 1, the page does not contain any universal results.

The interesting thing about this type of yo-yo is that the webmaster is getting a gift with the high rankings - but might assume instead that there's a penalty instead and they "really" deserve page #1 all the time. We always think our own children are the best looking, don't we ;)

So the site that I mentioned at the beginning, the one I'm still pondering, may well have been the experimental "gift" type of ranking. In fact - today the site still oscillates, but it's now between #3 and #6, and it no longer shows a strong time-of-day switch. I'm going to study how universal search affects that switch.