I cannot express in words the frustration I have felt recently while trying to influence the results of Google Base. These feelings reached the boiling point last Friday when I placed a product search for a key term that one of my clients is adamant about ranking highly on. Here is a pic of the results:

As you can see, one site dominates the listings. This occurred sometime Thursday night and as of this Monday the results are still the same. Traditionally Google Base results are fairly spread out amongst competitors provided the proper key term is in the title and description. This is the first instance where I have seen this behavior on a highly competitive term.

Now, why could this be occurring? I can really only think of two reasons:

1) Google Base is temporarily insane and will eventually correct itself.

2) Google Base is undergoing some sort of change and this is simply a side effect.

3) This competitor’s feed has some sort of mojo that no other competitor has.

I think that it may be a combination of all three. Interestingly, this morning I noticed that the initial teaser results on the term do not reflect the same as the first page of product listings: