Ranking Problem (my most important Q so far on here)

[activitysuper]

Hi,

I have a keyword which is location specific and without any work doing to it, it ranked page 4 position 7.

I did 4 guest posts all in one go and the it moved to page 3 position 5, I then left it for a week (position didn't move) and did another guest post a day after the guest post had been indexed I lost rankings and moved back to page 4, position 4.

Has anyone got an idea why this happened? Is it a case its just fluxing and I could see in a few days it come back to page 3 position 2 or do you think I got an initial boost because the guest posts all went up and its just a fluke that it dropped when the 5th one went up?

This is a big deal for me because I rely on guest posting a lot, I've even got a copy writer pumping out 500 quids worth of content a month just for guest blogging.

I need to understand what is happening, this is one of the most important questions so far on here so I would appreciate some talk on the matter.

[activitysuper]

I mentioned the copy writer because guest blogging is a big part of what I do and have seen good rankings from it for other keywords.

The keyword in question is connected to a brand new page with only 4 guest posts going to it so your answer helped me understand that flux will happen but if I carry on I should move up but carry on fluxing to the point where I will stabilise over time.

The money spent on guest blogging is spread out across multiple keywords, a small amount is being used for this new page.

But because I do so much of it, I need to understand as much as possible about guest blogging, thus spawning this thread.

[DougRoberts]

Can you provide more details of the your site and the keyword your targeting?

If you're spending lots of money on blog posts and still lurking down on Page 3/4 then I'd be worried that you're not getting the return on investment. Are you getting ANY traffic to this keyword?

If you don't want to post the info here, then feel free to drop me a private message.

[activitysuper]

Thanks.

The page 1 results seem to never move really maybe a few swaps over a month but the top 5 are pretty much concreted in.

After page 2, targeting of the term dilutes, maybe 4/10 don't use the exact term in the title tag.

I guess the guest posts I put on the blogs would have been on the homepage of these sites for about a week until new guest posts pushed mine off the homepage and into the achieve.

[DougRoberts]

I wouldn't worry too much. You really want to look at the ongoing trends rather than just one weeks results. I've got certain keywords I'm tracking where I seem to swap position with my SERP neighbour every week!

If you see a trend where your slipping down the SERPS week after week then I'd start investigating why.

Remember the pages you're creating don't exist in a vacuum on the net and there are lots of factors affecting your ranking. What are the other sites in the SERPS for you keywork doing?

Blog posts may rank higher when they're new. Google has a freshness factor that it'll use when ranking so you can often see news worthy content slowly drifting down the SERPS over time.

As you build an authentic, diverse link profile I would expect to see more stability.

Hope this helps.