Hi Guys,

Have you noticed any of your sites bouncing around in Google quite dramatically?

I have! I have had Top 5 results disappear to only come back a few days later.

You?

I haven't had this happen.

I have weird things happening sometimes - if I enter a keyword too many times in google on my laptop, it starts to appear at #1 but in fact is ranked #15 on any other machine in the office.

Google alters search results based on the sites you frequent from it. So if you continually click a site in google, even if it's ranked 10th, you'll likely end up getting it to first for your personal search results.

I've seen this happens fairly often. It seems to happen in the local version of their sites ie google.com.au etc. If you seach for the same thing through the main site google.com then the results will still appear. I thought it had something to do with them syncing their databases or maybe changing algorithm although only google can tell you this. As you said they usually come back.

Lemon

I used to work on 2 sites in a really competitve vertical and the yo yo used to happen all the time - often on what seemed to be a daily basis the top 15 sites would shuffle around (I was using tools to track so localisation was not a factor).. there almost seemed to be a pattern to it but I didn't take the time to record the results which in hind sight would've been some pretty interesting data to analyse!

I found that adding fresh content usually had a postive effect on the rankings.

Another thing about this vertical that I found really interesting was at one point google dropped 1 million results from the SERP and then that figure returned 6-8 months later.

Also Shaun - you didn't by chance point a few links at the site in question prior to this happening?

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Index > Rank > Monetise

I had a few #1 spots drop. Some went to page 2 and one of my most popular sites disappeared for a few weeks, came back and now its gone again.

These things tend to bounce around depending on content and what you are doing with them.

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FPR - I'm always adding links, its a daily occurrence. Its consistent.

Hi Shawn,

I have noticed some of this lately with Google, and I do regular ranking checks over a wide range of keywords (using automated tool) for enough different sites to notice it as a pattern.

Google had been the most stable over the last few months (a lot of sites not moving much in either direction without big pushes), however lately it's been a bit more volitile.

I have seen however a LOT more volitility with Bing and Yahoo (which I mainly run SERP checks on for interest as it's not a lot of traffic). One site I've had jumps of 50 positions up to first page and then back down in Bing, and another that was front page in Yahoo for a heap of keywords and now not in first 10 pages.

BTW this has NOTHING to do with Google personalisation (which Timmy's results definately are) as I have it turned off in Google options and also clear cookies just to be sure before running my checks.

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Matt
Marketing Web & Brand Police Blog
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