tedster - 2:18 pm on Aug 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm completely aligned with all that, Shaddows. I misunderstood you earlier and thought you were suggesting that there were "pure" trust-level partitions.

Where does the site sharing 3 live when your URL is there? And would you think of it as a direct competitor for any reason other than ranking?

I'll have to watch closer for that - it's a really good question. And yes, every site on page 1 is definitely a direct competitor. These sites are brands with high name recognition and big offline advertising budgets. All the competitors are PR 6, 7 or 8 (and the PR8 is next to the bottom!)

I oversimplified the situation up to now for easier discussion. There are actually two keyword phrases involved - synonyms. Both were yo-yos and both are now page 1, but cycling. One of the two query terms (the lower volume one) seems to be a major experiment for Google. There are 10 regular results, plus News, a Local box, a Video result and then Related Searches at the bottom. It's a real smorgasbord, but also a good SERP to learn from.