Is anyone seeing excessive ranking fluctuations?
-
Has anyone noticed an unusual shift in ranking fluctuations starting around 20 hours ago?
I have noticed some fairly major positive shifts on two different websites, interested if anyone else has seen the same thing.
-
If there are excessive ranking fluctuations, often this is because of a Googe core algorithm update.
We recommend waiting a few weeks to see where your website ranks after the update has finished rolling out.
It happened for the Bristol Summerhouse business which we own; it moved to page 2 and then back to page 1 without us needing to improve the company's organic SEO.
-
SEMrush Position tracking is showing a lot of false flux lately for a couple of reasons.
1) They don't identify your position in the SERPs and report it as "not in top 100". If you click to see the cache that they used to obtain the rankings your domain is there.
2) Google has been inserting and removing a link to the image results at the top of many SERPs. "Images for [your query]" When present, SEMrush is counting this link to the image results as position #1 and the result is all results below are pushed down one position. When not present, all of the results below move up one position. You don't notice this very much in your visibility score if you are on the second page. However, if you have keywords that rank in the top three or four it can make a huge change in your visibility score.
3) Google does seem to be experimenting a bit and even losing track of a few pages for the keywords that they typically rank for. So, yes there is a little more flux in Google, but the number changes in many of the tools are a result of contaminated data and bad data collection.
-
We have seen fluctuations in our 4 sites, we consider it seasonal as it happens every year around the holidays and picks back up in mid January
KJr
-
I have in the past week or so seen huge fluctuations. I've checked various algorithm sensors (SEMrush, Mozcast) etc. and for the industry we deal in there has been significant movement since around 12th January 2018.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rankings drop from the new update
Hello, I've noticed some big ranking downs on important keywords, from the last Google update, and don't really know what seams to be the problem, but have an assumption. In April 2015 we had 3.000.000 pages indexed by Google, and 80% of them had duplicated content for about 90% of it. The site I'm talking about is http://nobelcom.com/. The duplicated content came from variations between calling from and calling to selections, because each of this selection was making a new url (ex. nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to). If "calling from" and calling to were the same country the url was nobelcom.com/calling-from, but after you chosen another calling to, the url become like the one in the example. To solve this I've decided to keep the nobelcom.com/calling-from urls and for different calling to country to display the content trough a javascript, because it was the same, it changed only the country names and the rates. I thought that this change will help us with the duplicate content, and still deliver our client what they are interested in, without affecting the UX, and also reducing the link juice dilution because we had 3.000.000 indexed by Google and most of them with no added value Can this be the reason for the drops? Now we have 590.000 pages indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu1 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
Rankings traffic percentages
Hi All, It seems that some keywords that are receiving a fairly high amount of monthly traffic such as 6000 hits are passing very little traffic to my website. for a few keywords recieving this amount of traffic my site ranks on page one. is there a breakdown of what percentage of traffic you should roughly get to your website depending on the rank for a certain keyword. example; position 1 send approximately % traffic to your site position 2 send approximately % traffic to your site etc thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza_19850 -
Yahoo rankings anomaly?
Two days ago I went from ranking outside the top 50 to ranking #1 and #4 for two great terms on Yahoo. Now two days later I don't rank in the top 50 again. I sure wish I knew what that blip on the radar was all about. It would be great to get ranked again. Seems like a mystery. I have not heard of this happening on Yahoo before. Maybe it was a problem with the open link explorer? Anyone see this happen before? Thank you, Boodreaux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Rankings Issue
Hey guys, and gals, So our site http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/ is having the hardest time ranking in the big G. We've built links, optimized, and all the other basics. If you guys have a chance, could you take a glance, and tell us what you think, as to why this site is having such a hard time. Much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leatherupseo0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0 -
How to get subdomains to rank well?
Hi All, I am setting up a new site and I want to make use of subdomains to target multiple countries as follows: uk.mydomain.com us.mydomain.com australia.mydomain.com etc. Now i know what you're all going to say, why not use folders as they are more effective. Well I did think of this but decided against it because I would like to make the best of a low competition industry. I want to push my competitors as far down in the SE's as possible and i plan to do this by targeting generic non locational search terms with both sites so I can hog the top 4 spots.as follows: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/keyterm uk.mydomain.com uk.mydomain.com/keyterm-in-the-UK Whats steps can I take to ensure rank passes to my subdomains? Is it better to start the site with folders like www.mydomain.com/us/keyterm and then 301 them to subdomains at a later stage or should i start with the subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith1