Ralph_Slate - 12:04 am on Sep 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

I'm curious if anyone here has ever seen this effect.

I did a search for [blue widgets], where the blue widgets were an obscure search term, but I have a page whose title is a direct match on blue widgets.

Google returned just five results, and said it could only find five. All five were relevant. It then had a section that said "Results for similar searches", and my exact-match page was the only one in that section.

It also had a "In order to show you the most relevant results, some have been omitted." link. When I clicked on that, it said there were 1.4 million results. In those results, my site came up as #11 (a position I see a lot of)..

There was no typo or anything to differentiate the top 5 results from the "similar search" result. I have a screenshot.

Is this a clear indication of some kind of penalty on my site, that my direct-match page was listed as a "similar search", in a separate section from the other results that Google returned?