brinked - 11:04 pm on Dec 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

It looks like google doesnt like exact matches anymore. I played around with one of my sites, it used to rank #7 for a popular 2 word phrase, had it first in the title tag, oct 22ns it got dropped to page 3 for over a month. I than changed the title, putting the term in the title tag but putting other words between it and now it ranks #3! Thanks google.

On the bad end of this, I did a very specific search: newborn belly button infection

which turns up no relevant results for me, but it used to turn up exact matches that were very helpful before oct 22nd.

I hope google isnt deciding exact matches are now a bad thing, how far can you really go with penalizing for over optimization? Come on google, I hope this all gets fixed in January, I hate having to call the pediatrician for every small thing.