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One domain I own has a couple of hundred pages, and has separate pages that rank very well across a variety of keywords.
About 1 month ago, I decided to do some copy testing on one of the pages. This page had a #1 ranking for a 2-word phrase with 17.6M competing pages in Google. Traffic for that keyword is light, so I would categorize this as a only a moderatley competitive keyword.
In order to do the copy testing, I had to replace this #1 ranking page with a meta-refresh that redirected all visitors to rotator script, which then split the visitors to various versions of the page I was testing with different copy on each one.
Shortly after making this change, the page disappeared from the SERPs for the keyword it had been #1 for.
I ended my test yesterday (so the "real" page had been gone for a month). Put the page with the new copy back up in place of the meta-refresh page. And today the page is back at #1 - only 24 hours later.
The page is displayed in the SERPs as only the URL, i.e. [blahblah.com...] - no title tag, no description snippet.
Now here's what is interesting.
I have another domain that I put up sometime this spring, didn't do anything to it, didn't get any links, nada. I was just going to use it for some testing with AdWords.
I forgot about this second domain until about 2 mos ago. I got some free links back to this second domain by submitting a bunch of my articles to a directory. The links back to this second domain were all in the form of [keyword1-keyword2-keword3.com...] . No real anchor text per se, but the keywords are in the url. I got about 50 of these links from good high PR pages in this other directory.
I can find this second domain in Google, but it is buried for its phrase.
And get this... Google displays it in the SERPS as [keyword1-keyword2-keword3.com...] - no title tag, no description snippet.
It seems that Google held my place in line so to speak for the first page which had effectively been removed for a month.
Yet this new domain seems that it may be held back even though it ranks #1 for allinanchor for the 3 words in the url (I am not sure cause I have not put a lot of energy into getting it to rank - though the 3-word phrase is specific enough that it should show up with 50+ backlinks).
Strange new algo indeed.
The other domain I mentioned above is still stuck in the sandbox, even though it has 50 or so PR6 pages linked to it from a domain that I don't own (I am not whining - just reporting observations). BTW, those 50 new links are only about 2 mos. old, and the domain went up in May 2004 (I think).
