A Google Filter that Forces Position 5 or 15?

[rowtc2]

I have a website who was passed from 950 penalty in January and August 2008.
I am observing most of my landing pages are on 5th position and lower.A lot of them are in 5th and 15th.

Anyone expirienced this situation? I assume the site doesn't have enough Trust to be in top 3.

What i should do ?

[tedster]

That's a very interesting observation. I've not seen anything official about this (and we're not likely to, either) but I've had a similar feeling. It's hard to say anything definitive without a ton of data, but something like fixed "test positions" seems to have rolled over the past year, first resulting in the Position #6 Bug [webmasterworld.com] a year ago.

My feeling (not solid analysis yet) is that the Yo-Yo Effect [webmasterworld.com] may also tie in, because it certainly seems to rely on certain forced positions. The fact that your urls were just recently released from the -950 penalty may be an important part of the picture - as a guess, it could be a way to test whether they perform well against the current competition.

We'll see if anyone else has similar observations.