My rankings are up and down like a Yo-Yo. Any ideas why?

[pugh]

One of the companies that I work for sells the latest smartphones.

It ranks fairly well for key terms in an extremely competitive field. Recently the rankings of one particular handset have been extremely erratic and do not follow the pattern of other products, I am wondering if anyone can offer some insight as to why this is happening?

When the handset was first announced, it ranked fairly well (20th). This is good when you bare in mind that it is an ecommerce site competing with top tech sites. Prior to release, the ranking gradually declined to 33rd. I believe this may be due to reviews being publsihed (as a result of review handsets being sent out prior to release) as Google has started to favour reviews and news updates.

I have seen a similar pattern with other handsets, reviews and news are favoured by Google prior to release, but once the product is available, my rankings rise and remain on the first page provided that links are still coming in.

However, the rankings of this handset dropped from 27th to below 50th upon launch. The next week the ranking rose from >50th to 7th, dropped to below 50th again the following week, rose back to 9th the week after and has now dropped again to below 50th. These are by far the biggest changes in rankings I have seen on a week to week basis.

The page has a strong link profile in order to achieve such a high ranking in the first place. With this being the case I have no idea why ranking can drop off so much in the space of a week?

Update: I forgot to mention initially that I have the variant listed twice, one for each colour variant. All content is the same apart from the colour being altered in the appropriate places. This has not been a problem in the past, but perhaps it is due to recent changes to Google algorithm?

[YGF]

No I don't have more than one variant...

[pugh]

That sounds similar to my experience. I have just realised that what is in fact happening is that it is picking up a different variant each week.

So one week it picks up the black handset in the top 10 results, the next week the black handset has dropped to below 50, but it is picking the white up on the 4th page.

Have you got more than one variant of your product listed at all?

[YGF]

I have had exactly the same experience-  my ranking report on SEO moz report said I dropped >45 places; from 6th to somewhere outside the top 50 for a search term that I had been doing well on- I made no changes to that page, when I look in google now though I am back to 6th where I had been last week. So the question is; was SEOmoz report wrong or for the date in question 23rd of March or did Google drop my ranking down 45+ places and bring it back in less than 4 days?

Any help grately appreciated.

thanks,

Sinead

[pugh]

Thanks for your response Vinod.

I have been adding back links over time so I'm not sure why it is so erratic.

[vinodchaudhary]

In general, when there are frequent ups and down then backlinks made over time helps getting stable ranks.

Not sure if backlinks will help you, still you can try it. No harm.