Why are my SERPs fluctuating 60+/- on a weekly basis?
-
I have a blog that's gone from not indexed, to indexed and ranked around 85 on 3 target key phrases. With a bit of SEO the blog jumped to around 11th on those 3 key phases in a week or so. Now, the following week, it has bombed back to 76th. Why the dramatic fluctuations?
-
Hey Karl,
I think Keri pretty much summed it up. You can edit the source in WordPress. On your WordPress dashboard home page, navigate to Appearance --> Editor. On the right sidebar of that page you should see a list of different links that navigate to different areas of your theme editor. Navigate to Header. This should be where the changes need to be made, but you can check all the pages for your theme if you are concerned. What pages are there will be a bit different for everyone depending on the theme. I'd always recommend saving a backup of your original theme before making changes though!
But I think taking Keri's advice and adding more quality content and getting rid of any suspect outbound links should help a lot.
-
My husband is here having a good laugh with me over the URL that I brought up just as he came in from the garage. "It's from Q&A and it's work related honey, honest!"
Have you viewed your source? Do you know about the link to an adult site with an H1 about bondage that's in there? Your privacy policy also has a link to car insurance on it. There's an affiliate link to the Socrates theme, too. If none of those are yours, I'd suggest removing them. Might help, certainly can't hurt.
I put one phrase from your site into Google, and found a couple of dozen sites that had that phrase. To be honest, you've got a real thin site without much content, and if the content you do have is not unique, there's not much compelling reason for the search engines to return your site instead of another site. Open Site Explorer reports links from nine different domains, and most of them look like profile links.
I'd first focus on getting some unique content in there, making sure that your site is clean without hidden links or text, get content in there that someone would want to link to, then focus on linking.
-
Thanks Keri - I do have the campaign actively running and tracked here in SEOmoz, and regularly check the SERPs in scroogle.org. the URL is www.getoverabrokenheart.org (cheesy, I know), with the three key phrases:
"get over a broken heart, getting over a broken heart, getting over broken heart"
The blog is set up to act as an affiliate arm in a sales funnel for an online product.
Hope that helps. Any rank performance information and suggestions would be great.
Thanks again!
-
How are you checking these SERPs? Are you using the same computer/browser each time? Are you logged into a Google account with personalization and cache some/all of the time? That can really affect things.
Try consistently checking from a browser that is in private browsing mode, which will help to minimize the personalization used for your search results. The SEOmoz Rank Tracker should also be able to provide you with ranking data that is non-personalized.
Are you able to share with us your URL and three key phrases?
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
-
What would the US traffic increase be for a website YoY if all Google SERP rankings remained the same?
This question has come up a few times with some of our clients and I've spent some time researching this question, but I can't find an answer online so hopefully, someone at MOZ has this data available to them with all the data they collect. The data points that would be needed to answer this question off the top of my head: Increase in the # of Google Searches in the US YoY The decrease in CTR for organic results "10 blue links" which take a searcher off of Google YoY, as Google continues to keep more searchers on Google.com with rich snippets, increased AdWords prominence, AdWords extensions, etc I'm sure this greatly varies per industry, but an average for all industries is all that is needed to answer this client question. Many thanks in advance and I've included a video which hopefully helps to better explain the search "plus/minus" that we can expect to see as SEOs in 2018. WF1yLlJC6LetnpbD3
Search Behavior | | WebpageFX1 -
Strategy for 301s/404s
Hi all, We receive a feed containing new products every morning, some products are removed and this obviously ends up in Webmaster as a 404. Is it fine to leave this as a 404 or would 301'ing the link be a better option? If we leave as a 404 we end up with thousands after a couple of month which scares me and makes finding actual 404s more difficult. Essentially, if lots of pages are being removed everyday, what's the best way of tackling these? Thanks!
Search Behavior | | HB170 -
Macro Market / Trends Tools Analysis ?
Hello Mozzzzzzzzz fans ! One tiny, cute question. Has anyone ever faced the following situation: I'm working on trends projects but I'm struggling to access the information; Let say that we're trying to provide insight around the youth French people. What tool would you recommend to find the most accurate trends ? I've looked around: Google trends, Google Adwords Planning, Reddit, Quora .. Any other tools in mind maybe ?
Search Behavior | | JoomGeek0 -
SERP with no "www"
I have noticed that Google SERP without login is showing the domains without " www " - all of them. Have you seen this too? What does it mean for us?
Search Behavior | | Elchanan0 -
Local SERPs Question - Phone Call or Click?
I have a client who recently experienced a boost in local organic rankings. They were appearing towards the bottom of the local (maps) results (with their phone number & address listed) for their main target keywords. After this ranking boost, they are now positioned higher in the SERPs, in the traditional organic section. It seems as though this boost in rankings has actually caused a slight DECREASE in organic search traffic to their website. My theory is that when they were listed in the Google+ Local section of Google, some people must have been calling directly from the SERPs instead of actually clicking through to their website. Due to the issues involved with organic call tracking, it's obviously difficult to measure the actual impact of strong Google+ Local rankings. So, I'm on a mission to find some reliable data on this. For my own peace of mind and that of my client. Does anybody know of any research conducted that analyses the % of local searches that result in a phone call directly from the local SERPs without actually clicking through to a business' website or Google+ page? In know this is a tricky one (and probably harder to ascertain on desktop than mobile) but any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Search Behavior | | Dave_Eddy0 -
Any Good Study on the Effects of CTR on Keyword Capitalization in SERP Description
Hey Guys I am wondering if any of you have done any study or testing on this ( or perhaps you might have come across one at some point in your career ) Personally I feel that while adding a description , it makes sense to Capitalize the Keywords and other words ( first letter only ) that I want to emphasise on ( perhaps stuff like Buy, High Quality, Best, etc ) . I want to pick your brains on this and see what you guys think about it. I have not tested the effects on CTR yet .. if someone else has then it will be a good resource for me to go through. ( and if no one else has done any relevant study I might do it at some stage ). Regards Saijo
Search Behavior | | Saijo.George0 -
Best way to remove worthless/thin content?
I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc. I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content. Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route? Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects? Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else? Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages? Any help would be great!
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Google Places rankings go away, but organic rankings stay the same / get better?
Hello, I hope you all can help me out here with the information I could provide. Anyways, the past number of months I have had 1 of our clients rank extremely high organically and on Google places. For example: My client is a law firm so if you search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” they would come up organically on the first page and if you were in that town and search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” or even just “Attorney” they would also come up in the Google Places list. Now for some reason starting a week ago I noticed they have completely disappeared from Google Places. No changes have been done to their site and everything is the same as it was. Their organic searches are the same if not better than before. Do you guys have any clue as to why this happened and how I could possibly turn this around? Thanks for your help in advance!
Search Behavior | | WhiteHat120