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Fantastic post James,

I think I can answer your questions:

- What made jump straight to #1? - And did this trigger some kind of warning/penalty that made it disappear?


For whatever rason, Google indexed BlueSweets first. This was probably due to the the backlink you built. One of the backlinks was probably picked up and sent to indexing first for this site. Since it then became the best match (as the other two were not indexed yet) it was shown 1st. It might also have to do with the cloud as perhaps in another part of the world another site was showing. You might want to check logs for Googlegot crawl times for those early days.


 - We know about penalties for over-doing exact match links so why did escape unscathed? - It has a link profile consisting of 100% exact match links and no other directly competing site has this many exact match links for that keyword so in theory the site should stick out like a sore thumb.


When there are few choices for the best match there is no need to filter out a site that is spammy on anchor text. Out of 3 good matches it still desrves to be shown. If there were 100 good relevance matches then perhaps it would get put into the supplemental index.


 - This leads me on to my next point that what results would we see in a different sector? - Google undoubtedly monitors some SERPs more than others so what would be considered a dangerous number of exact match links is relative to the marketplace.

If there are a lot of quality sites competing for a keyphrase then you would expect the spammy one to perform worse than the "natural" one and the least relevant to perform the worst. This is what we are currently seeing with the three sites in your experiment. Just because all of the anchor text is the same doesn't mean the site should get banned. If there is no relevant anchor text ( why should it outrank sites with relevant anchor text (all other things being equal)?


 - The eagle eyed amongst you will note that the ranking URL was rather than the main URL – odd considering I mistakenly installed WordPress there for less than 5 minutes before I realised what I'd done, removed it and re-added to the root folder. If anyone has a theory on how Google managed this or why it happened...I would love to know!


I'm guessing you were using the Google toolbar on the same browser you were creating the site. The toolbar will send new URLs for indexing. /p  got there first so Google creates the snippet with that URL. They must have rechecked the URL after the initial indexing and ranking and fixed it later. Google pulls one set of data in, works with it, and sometimes it won't recheck and fix the snippet for some time. For Google it's important to show new things quickly. I've seen snippets take a while to change so the snippet must be getting cached at different times to the ranking changes.

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