Naturally; rankings will change with time, as the topology of the web changes, and Google index new sites or re-index old ones. The Google Dance is the result of this re-indexing, not of systematic monkeying to do down specific sites. Their underlying algorithm simply does not change, and there exists no organisation with the manpower to manually tweak the rankings of more than 4 billion pages.
Chronos,
I completely agree with your findings and your point that “auto wax” and “car wax” have VASTLY different results in Google (for instance) in regards to pulling up Glen’s website.
That’s because Glen ISN’T optimizing for “auto wax” but “car wax”, “car care”, “car waxing” etc. You CANNOT dominate EVERY search term related to wax without a serious marketing work and many many people applying Glen’s methods.
In a nutshell, here’s how it all works: You request text links from other websites that have your key words (In Glen’s case: “car wax”, “car care”) as the “anchor text” of those links.
For Example, a link pointing to Glen’s site may look like this:
<a href=“http://www.5starshine.com”>Car Wax, Car Care at 5StarShine.com!</a>
Google indexes the anchor text of “Car Wax, Car Care at 5StarShine.com!” and makes it relevant for searches. Glen can manipulate his rankings for various keywords/phrases by using INCOMING links that have varying anchor text in them.
Here’s a few more examples:
- <a href=“http://www.5starshine.com”>Never Wax Your Car Again!</a>
- <a href=“http://www.5starshine.com”>Care Care Products at 5StarShine.com!</a>
The first example (when placed on say 100 other incoming websites) will raise Glen’s rank for the words “never” “wax” “your” “car” and “again”. The more words placed in the anchor text weakens the strength each one posesses.
The second example (when placed on many incoming hyperlinks) targets “car” “care” “products” as keywords. Glen’s site will receive better ranking for those keywords and phrases.
This isn’t something new that I’m sharing, many many webmaster forums have posts in regards to the importance of the anchor text of incoming links. It’s pretty much how you can dominate search engine results for whatever keywords you want. I’m sure Google’s algorithm actually takes into account what you SELL on your own website, so these results can’t be skewed TOO greatly, but that’s the general principle.
If Glen wants to get #1 for “auto wax”, he just has to get more incoming links using that phrase as anchor text. You can test my theory by going to Google and entering:
“link:http://www.5starshine.com” and seeing what text links are on those pages. It should help you see how that anchor text is so important to getting good ranking in all of the search engines. When Glen wants to dominate another search phrase, he just adjusts the link you get off his website to use that phrase.
Sorry for the long post, I hope we are still on topic.
NPR’s Morning Edition is running a series this week on search engines. You might find this useful:
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2004/apr/google/
I have a website that is the #1 listed site in Google on its particular subject. (Out of 85,000) It ranks pretty high in just about all other search engines I’ve looked.
It got there by me simply submitting it to the few main web search engines, providing good clear information, and picking up lots of links from other well rated sites. Plus I do a minor revamp every year or so to keep up to date.
No tricks, no paid agencies, nothing fancy on the pages, no java script, no redirects, no web-rings, no link farming. Just plain html and accurate keyword headers.
This is the surest way of getting listed and getting a good rank.
Course, the fact it was the first of its kind might have also helped 
There’s not much you can do if yours is the 80,000th Britney Fan Page.
Unfortunately, the original poster was last here back in 2006, I think.
Having this thread bumped up could open an interesting conversation. When I saw the post recommending meta tags, my first thought was: “Do these still do anything? I used them when I was playing around in HTML around 2000, but I thought search engines now simply ignore them.” Then I saw that that post was from 2004. I guess the ongoing arms race between search engines optimizers and the page ranking algorithms must have come a long way in those twenty years.
Moderator Note
This thread was bumped by a spammer who has since been wished away to the cornfield.