Just remember that even though a google search looks pretty seamless to us, on a day to day basis your results can come from any number (I think it’s 21 at last count) of ‘data centers’.

These are VERY RARELY in complete synchronisation, so prob what you are seeing is a penalty seeping through the datacentres - you’ve just happened to got different data centres on the day, one with the penalty applied, another without.

Overall though, the news looks not good for you Hope it all turned out ok.

theDuck

Call it whatever you want but it doesn’t make any sense.

Last month our site dropped to the end of results, then we did… NOTHING.

About 4 days later everything was fine again, until today when we dropped again.

So I have 2 theories:

- Google thinks that our site sucks, but just sometimes, not all the time

- Google is just rotten

What will we do? Nothing but curse G.

In my opinion you’re wrong with the “social divide” thinking on the web. Yes, sites that are well known (generally high PR) will often know other sites that are well known (again, generally high PR). But on the web anyone can publish his own content and it’s fairly easy to find at least someone who likes it, writes about it and passes it on to some well known site.

Also - the “social divide” often only comes in to play when rich and poor sites compete for the same keywords. If you try to top Dell for “computer” with a PR1 page, it just won’t work. But if you target your own niche, you can easily find something that a PR1 page could dominate. It’s the same as offline, only on the web you will almost always find people to search for your niche. Say you can get 500 people world-wide interested in your “banality of bananas” niche: if you’re a small company (”poor” site) then those 500 might be enough to grow on. Who cares about ranking for “computers”.

What I’m trying to say is that if your site never gets indexed because everything written goes straight to Supplemental hell, it’s nearly impossible to get links in the first place.

This low signal to noise ratio with Google is kind of a bit like, as I have said before, a social divide, where the rich and well established get richer, and the poor get poorer.