mhansen - 12:11 pm on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

Seeing a noticeable change in search result pages this morning (Saturday, USA)

We have a site that we are trying to work back from the Penguin update on April 24th. One of our higher converting 3 word phrases where we used to rank within top-3 for many years (normally fluctuated 1,2, or 3), is showing very odd results. After April 24th Penguin, only our xml sitemap page ranked for this specific phrase, and it was in the mid 50's. It was the same result in Chrome or FF, logged in to Goog services (chrome) or not.

Today, I spotted the 3-word phrase back in the traffic report and checked the serps in Chrome, logged into services. The top 14 results haven't fluctuated much, but our site now ranks in EVERY position from 15th-24th. All 10 spots, all in a row.

I then jumped over to FF, with tracking obfuscated as much as possible (many cookies blocked, never login, etc) and the results are just as weird. Site page ranks 8th-9th, then on page 3, 21st-29th, all in a row.

The very odd part to all of these weird rankings is that the landing page for that 3-word-phrase, is not in the list of ranked pages, they are general content pages that link to it.