Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The most curious thing I've noticed is that when I search "widget history" the results don't just highlight "widget" but also "widgets" and "widgeting". I wonder if Google is looking at different forms of the same word now, they never did before. I don't see this happening on one word searches.
Many of my pages are down by one on PR but overall the key words & phrases I am most concerned about are still in the top 10. It's just all mixed around a little.
Right now I do the best overall on Yahoo. Too bad so few people use Yahoo.
<Ok, here's an interesting question - I have two computers in front of me, both with the Google Toolbar installed. One of them is showing my site as a PageRank 9 where it was before this update. The other one is showing it as an 8. Cache cleared, refreshed, etc... what the heck? >
Try to uninstall and then reinstall the toolbar. It might help.
My site is a good site and the visitors it targets just love it. My site is THE authority site. There is no other. Many people spend a half hour on my site, viewing in excess of 300 pages.
Could it be a sudden increases in links? This is NOT reflected in the number of links in the link: command, but the increase is real.
In the past couple of months, when my site was enjoying the #1 position for its keyword, there has been a sharp increase in incoming links from many sites and from bloggers.
I have a page for every "free widget plan" I offer. There is a page for free "twisted" widget plan, free "wonky" widget plan, free "banana" widget plan, etc. Boatloads of scrapers for the keywords "twisted" "wonky" and "banana" have links to my sites.
My index page features a list of links to all my internal pages that contain "free widget plans." And for a long time I ranked poorly because Google thought my page was about "twisted wonky bananas." I added link titles and some text about widget plans, and that seemed to do the trick.
In closing, I'm guessing that my problem is either a surge in link popularity, or something with titles that may be too rich with keywords.