looking great on most data centers but dismal on Google.com

does this discrepancy mean a penalty for that key word?

[annej]

For the last few years my homepage has ranked from 4th to 6th for the best keyword in my field. It dropped to the 40s a couple of months ago and and just went down to the 60s but only when I search on Google.com. On the other data centers I've checked it just moved up from 22 to 12. Why would the results be so different?

I'm wondering it there is a problem with the homepage that is getting it penalized (or at least knocked down a long way) for that word. It seems to affect just the one key word.

A single page of mine with very few inbound links is ranking ahead of the homepage in a search for the key word. The individual page has just has a handful of inbound links while the homepage has well over a thousand including university and gov links.

I feel like I must have done something to trigger this but I can't figure out what. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[tedster]

It's an interesting issue that others have noticed, too. The only answer is that querying the data centers directly by the IP address gives you some kind of preliminary results that still get another filter applied for the results displayed on google.com

[glengara]

How are you doing on the English language regional Gs?

[annej]

Yes, this definitely looks like the keyword has been filtered out for some reason. If it's too many links to me with the word that's crazy. Should I write to everyone and tell them they can't link to the page by site name? (being sarcastic here).

I could change my universal navigation, write it so the word isn't in there but it won't be as intuitive to visitors then. If I knew that was what triggers the filter I'd consider doing it though.

How do I check the regional Google centers?