Dear Dan. THANK YOU for this excellent information. We are still pretty new to this so this helps a lot!
We did some work already and now are noticing also strange behaviour around capitalization, which makes no sense to us at all; any thoughts on that? Here some more details:
I am finding out some interesting things about G search results as I further explore what has happened to my site.
The results are different if you use small case or capital letters such as RC A-10 Warthog or rc a-10 warthog.
The results are different at different times of the day, sometimes within minutes. Before 7 am today most of the pages which I modified were in the top 10 results, now about 1/2 of them have slipped to page two.
There is absolutely no logic to all the variables. For example, my site returned to its normal traffic (the same way it was before the algorithm change) of over 5,000 views per day on Saturday and Sunday. Just last weekend it barely got to 3,000 views. And, I haven't changed enough pages to the new format to directly affect those results. I wonder if Google has made an adjustment and that is why many of my pages are getting back to near where they were before? I look forward to tonight's final numbers for the day to see if it was solely for the weekend or if it continues.
However, using rc a-10 warthog in small letters, the air hogs page is no where to be found, yet my page is no. 4 as of right now. In Caps, RC A-10 Warthog it is no. 11 right now.
The above example may lead you to believe that the pages on my site should all be in the higher search results when using small case. However, check out Japanese Zero vs japanese zero. Just the opposite is true. In this case my page rates higher when entering it with Capital letters.
Yet, if you look at RC A-6 Intruder vs rc a-6 intruder, they are both around no. 7 in the search results.
Check out how little content is on the page that is higher in the results than mine for the A-6:
http://www.dhgate.com/jet-airplane-a-6-intruder-high-grade-rtf/p-ff80808128ed96260128f2db154e1e9f.html
Check out my A-6 page:
http://www.aviationtrivia.info/Grumman-A-6-Intruder.php
I think it is because DH Gate, like Amazon, simply has thousands of pages and G likes that, even if each page has little content. Do you concur?
I think what G is doing is known as the google dance. It is reminiscent of the cypher codes used to encrypt top secret transmissions for the military in that it is constantly changing so as to discourage detection. What may be a top page one day can rate up to 10 positions lower on another.
Many of my pages have slipped only slightly when G changed their algorithm, such as from no. 1 in the search results to no. 3. (Virtually all the top rated pages are now ones which have videos.) However, that has been enough to make a big difference in traffic and sales.
Other than start taking videos of some 500 rc airplanes featured on my site, putting the videos on my site and YouTube, and hoping that the videos will be highly rated, I don't know how to get my pages as high in the search results as the YouTube pages.
The other pages which usually are higher in G's search results are forums like RC Universe and RC Groups. They have tens of thousands of pages, none of which have been changed, dating back to the late 1990's. Not much I can do about that either.
My aim is to be in G's search results right after the videos and forums. I think that someone searching for a rc airplane for sale will go right past them if they know that Aviation Trivia has ALL the rc airplanes of a particular model listed on it on a single page.
The changes I've made, ie. no longer dividing the page between the actual aircraft and rc models of it, has gotten those pages back into the top ten search results, but not for both Caps and small letters.