Why are my SERPs fluctuating 60+/- on a weekly basis?

[ksracer]

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?

[Adria.Saracino]

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.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[ksracer]

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!

[KeriMorgret]

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?