mantucket - 6:51 pm on Jun 5, 2010 (gmt 0)

tedster

I am seeing an assortment of different PAGES being ranked for the same keyword - a term that historically had just one "winner" page on the site.

I am seeing that too, in fact I'm seeing something very unusual in how goog is matching keywords against cached content and I'd like to know if any others can confirm. Here's an example.

Normally google was very good at returning the best match on my site for a search involving my (unique, non-keyword) domain name. Now I get 3 or 4 less-relevant pages from my same site before the direct-hit inventory page appears. I am wondering whether the value of keyword-in-URL has been cut for certain cases.

So for domain 'example.com', the search:

"large blue widgets boston example"

Would almost always return this URL first:

widgets.example.com/?item=large-blue-boston

But now, it returns several 'parent' pages or geographically adjacent pages which link to the item page.

Now one really odd thing is the matching I see when I click "cached":

It says "the following terms appeared only in LINKs to this page: 'example' " ...

I.e., it's not matching 'example' as part of the URL, and not highlighting it!

As best as I can recall, the cache-match used to count and highlight keyword matches in the URL... or maybe not? Can any of you remember for sure?

Now the other odd thing - the domain name, 'example' - is not a keyword, and does NOT appear in any link text, except perhaps where a raw link gets posted. I'll double-check that - but the in-page matching which determines the second-order ranking seems 'broken' to me.

Thoughts?

[edited by: tedster at 7:13 pm (utc) on Jun 5, 2010]

[edited by: mantucket at 7:47 pm (utc) on Jun 5, 2010]