Back at the end of October and for the first couple of weeks in November we were observing and blogging about some very interesting behaviour from the big G, and there was a lot of speculation (including on our part) regarding what was actually going on. However, one thing most people saw was a definite dropping of a site’s index page (and often strong sites with sitelinks) out of the index, leaving only the inner pages to either rank on their own merits instead, or not, as the case may have been.

Well we think that’s still coming, and that they’re still playing twisting the dials, as this is what we observed whilst looking at our new Ibiza web design project demo site the SBS Sniper’s rankings last night. Firstly the normal state of affairs, sites with their index page lending power to the inner page’s ranking..

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..and then sites apparently now “disconnected” from their index page, ie. not dropdown indented, but 2 different entries in the SERP in 2 different places.

The blue and the green sites are ours, look at the way the pages disconnect from each other and straddle the yellow site, which remains in 4th place, although with the first screenshot above, it’s the 4th site, but it’s actually in 7th place because of the indented dropouts.

Note in the second screenshot it’s a genuine 4th position, and also note the red site still in first place, but with it’s second page now way down in 7th place.

This looks a lot like playing with the “authority” of the homepage’s connection or ability to affect inner page rankings for a phrase, – tweaking of internal link weighting, who actually knows what they’re doing, but the effects are clear enough to see when it happens.

Anyone else seen happening this on your travels?