dickbaker - 4:52 pm on May 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

Planet13, I must have missed your post when I was posting my reply.

To answer your question, here are the ranking results from last August for the phrase "Acme widgets" (I was studying changes in daily ranking):

1. The manufacturer's home page
2. The manufacturer's widget category page
3. The retail store's site that I did
4. A large ecommerce site ("Bill's Widgets") that sells Acme widgets. This is one of the largest ecommerce sites in my niche.
5. A site for radio-controlled cars that had a page that showed MSRP for Acme widgets (this one disappeared after a few weeks). I don't know why it was there.
6. My site
7. The home page of Acmewidgets.com, a site that sells Acme widgets. The owners have several sites for different brands of widgets, each using anchor text URL's.
8. Another ecommerce site ("Ed's Widgets") that sells Acme widgets
9. Another ecommerce site ("John Widgets") that sells Acme widgets
10. A smaller ecommerce site ("e-widgets") that sells Acme widgets. It disappeared from the first page after a couple of weeks.

Today's results:

1. The manufacturer's home page
2. The manufacturer's widgets page
3. The manufacturer's page for Model XYZ widgets (why this one model and not the other 40 models, I don't know)
4. The manufacturer's page for Model 123 widgets (ditto for "why this model")
5. The large ecommerce site ("Bill's Widgets") that sells Acme widgets.
6. Another large ecommerce site ("Al's widgets") that's quickly become very popular due to low prices
7. The retail store's site that I did (they dropped four spots recently)
8. The Acme widgets page of a large, established widget classifieds site
9. The home page of th site, Acmewidgets.com, a site that sells Acme widgets. This is the site for which owners have several sites for different brands of widgets, each using anchor text URL's.
10. The Acme widgets page of a large, established widget auction site

So, the manufacturer's site stayed and added two more pages. Bill's widgets, the retail store's site, and Acmewidgets.com stayed. The radio-controlled toy site disappeared. The three ecommerce sites that disappeared were all established sites around for 10 to 12 years. The smallest of these three had 5,670 pages as of last August. The other two had 37,655 pages and 42,153 pages.

My Acme widgets page had 4,190 links to it, according to Yahoo last August; today Yahoo shows 4,730 links. Bill's Widgets, the very large ecommerce site, had one link to its Acme widgets page as of last August; today, Yahoo shows 2 links. Acmewidgets.com had 111 links last August to its entire site, at least according to Yahoo. Yahoo now shows 57 links to the entire site.

The retail store's site I created has zero links to its Acme widgets page.

One interesting thing about Bill's Widgets, the very large ecommerce site, is the URL to the Acme Widgets page. It's this: BillsWidgets.com/Acme-widgets-Acme-doodads-sale-online-from-Acme-gizmos-models-XYZ-ABC-DEF-GHI-more-c-9935_13105_14338.html (where "XYZ", "ABC", "DEF" and "GHI" are all different models of Acme widgets).

I'm interested in Bill's widgets because they've retained or increased rankings on all sorts of phrases during Panda. Their site is a disaster visually, requires a lot of scrolling to view thumbnails of the different models, and is probably over 500K per page.

The retail store's site is very nice visually (although I don't know that Google can "see" anything but the plain html page), and the plain html page loads instantly. Even the redirected pages load quickly.

The retail store's site is very outdated, especially for Acme widgets, as Acme has dropped many of the models shown on the site, and added many new models not shown on the site.

As for where my pages wound up, there wasn't any set ranking number. It's #11 and #37 and #114, etc. The page for these widgets is now #115 or so.

It may well be that Google can't put my site into a neat classification. I have informational pages that are much like those on the ecommerce sites (but with more content) that serve much like ecommerce site pages, in that they pre-sell the widgets for the retail stores that advertise on my site. Maybe Google can't figure it out now, although they didn't have a problem before.