In omitted results for one word search term

But not supplemental, not duplicate, fine on other terms

[piney]

Last month, proboscis said "I had a page that was showing up in the number 15 spot for a popular 1 word search term and now it doesn't show up at all unless I go all the way to the end where it says: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries..." So I repeat the search and then the page is back at number 15."

This is happening to one of my URLs, also. On the search phrase, if I type in "widgets -moon", it is at its old spot (at about 3rd or 4th page of results), but if I just enter "widgets", it is omitted.

Can anyone shed light on what's going on? There is no duplicated content on other pages, no scraping by anyone else. It still ranks fine on the other words/phrases I check.

[annej]

Check this thread. [webmasterworld.com...]

People in this thread have also had experiences where a page is in the top 10 with one keyword phrase and around 950 with another keyword or phrase.

[tedster]

I think the "omitted results' phenomenon is a kind of clustering filter. It is possibly related to the -950, but it is still different in essence, I think. Usually it means exactly what the message says - your URL's content is looking very close to some other URLs content, at least as far as the algo's measure of near-duplicate is concerned.

There's a difference between a URL being detected as a near duplicate and being detected as a potential spammer/over-optimizer. Although scraper spam and duplication do come pretty close to being the same thing at times.

At any rate, I would suggest exploring the pages that are still in the original results set to see if something looks similar - or even stolen from you. Also, if you are using manufacturers text, or RSS feeds, or something else unoriginal on your page, that may also play in.

[edited by: tedster at 7:48 pm (utc) on May 13, 2007]

[piney]

It came back into the results today. When I noticed the problem, I reduced mention, site-wide, of the term by a third. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or it was just a strange temporary omission.

It is original content. It was only omitted from the results for one search word (as far as I know). A duplicate page would be omitted completely, right? It was like the 950 penalty but, for one, the search term only has 800 or so results that are shown. For another, the page was completely omitted for the search, whereas with the 950 people are still in the index.

[jimbeetle]

It is original content.

As Tedster suggested your content might have been stolen or scraped. Check some unique quoted sentences to see if that's the case.

It was only omitted from the results for one search word (as far as I know). A duplicate page would be omitted completely, right?

Not really. A major mechanism of the duplicate content filter is comparing the titles and returned snippets of candidate results at query time. Since the snippet is query dependent, pages can appear to be popping in an out of the SERPs for similar -- but slightly different -- search terms that return different snippets.

[piney]

I checked for scraped text but didn't see anything. It fell back out of the search results again this afternoon. It's number one on "obscure widgets" but omitted on "widgets". The "widgets" in this case is also a name of a popular software package (by a major software company) which is unrelated to the word as it is used on my site. Pages about that software program pretty much dominate the top 20 or so results. I would think, though, that if that was affecting my site in any way (a filter due to my site not having normal phrases compared to most) then the other sites like mine (ie non-related to the software) would also be omitted.

I have not watched single words before in the search results, only phrases. Do pages come in and out of the results like this more commonly when it is a single word?