Organic Rank Volitility
-
Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly. I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results.
The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment.
What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked. Four days later back on page 1. These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ? Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one.
Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings?
Thought?
-
John,
Believe me - we all understand how frustrating it can be, and how difficult it can be to go with the patience path. So I totally feel your pain!
-
Thanks for the thoughts. I get it. Anyone doing SEO on a site can only read and react with what is deemed appropriate and prudent changes.
I resubmitted a few key pages and was seeing if there was a quick reaction. I have never done this before and just thought it was strange and wondered if anyone had an explanation. I will go back to waiting for Moz to crawl and send me my campaigns reports.
Thanks to you both for the input. I am just very frustrated. We never received any warning from Google about link farms. Have really not done any back-linking in 5 or 6 years, have never been hit by any algorithmic change till now. While I figured one day it might happen it does not make it any less frustrating.
I realize I am too far down in the details those that say on here to just wait are nuts. Obviously some action is required or we would not have been knocked down.
-
Also be aware that it's a waste of time to frequently check to see if what you've done has helped you recover from Penguin. Penguin hit sites will ONLY see improvements if they have made the right changes, however that will only be reflected when Google actually refreshes the Penguin algorithm, and so far nobody has been able to report that a Penguin update has even happened yet.
Micromanagement of SEO is a death-knell. Do what you believe to be the right thing for the right reasons, and breathe....
-
I'd add to EGOL's response by offering this. Anyone who obsesses with checking rankings every day will miss bigger picture, longer-term trends. Every single day not only is Google testing, but there are countless other changes happening on the web to at least temporarily impact many results. Other sites in the same niche, news content, social media buzz, other SEOs working in the same niche... it all can impact short term results.
The other factor is if you're checking results while logged in to Google, and/or not using the &PWS=0 method for checking non-personalized results, because Google ALWAYS alters personalized results to one extent or another, and every search you do, further impacts ever next search. This is especially made worse because they're always wanting to algorithmically provide a variety of results, in the notion that if they do so, they may eventually give you something you'll click on and not return to search for.
-
I will take a look. I have never monitored rankings this closely before but we are making on-page changes and resubmitting in webmaster to try in help with the huge hit from Penguin.
So many opinions on things to do / change out there it is hard to know what to do but I figured a complete re-visit of key page on-page for all the product category pages was the first step.
So much is written about SEO but so little of it covers the unique issue that you have if you are doing e-commerce seo....for example if I have a category page and display 50 products per page on that category and 40 of the product have the keyword of the page in the product name. There is no way to really reduce the stuffing. The irony is I could reduce the stuffing but it would make the site less effective/ appropriate for the end user of the site.
If the on-page changed do not help I guess we will turn attention to getting more good backlinks to offset the non-sense site that have backlink to us for no good reason.
Back-links - I could rail for hours about this topic.
-
If you read the book: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (recommended reading for any SEO) you will learn how many people get "test SERPs".
Google does a lot of testing and I believe that they have been especially active at testing recently.
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
-
Page Rank on Moz compared to Ahrefs
So there seems to be a huge philosophical difference behind how Moz and Ahrefs calculates page rank (PA). On Moz, PA is very dependent on a site's DA. For instance, any new page or page with no backlinks for a 90DA site on Moz will have around 40PA. However, if a site has around 40 DA, any new page or page with no backlinks will have around 15PA PA. Now if one were to decide to get tons of backlinks to this 40 DA/15PA page, that will raise the PA of the page slightly, but it will likely never go beyond 40PA....which hints that one would rather acquire a backlink from a page on a high DA site even if that page has 0 links back to it as opposed to a backlink from a page on a low DA site with many, many backlinks to it. This is very different from how Ahrefs calculates PA. For Ahrefs, the PA of any new page or page with no backlinks to it will have a PA of around 8-10ish....no matter what the DA of the site is. When a page from a 40DA site begins acquiring a few links to it, it will quickly acquire a higher PA than a page from a 90DA site with no links to it. The big difference here is that for Ahrefs, PA for a given page is far more dependent on how many inbound links that page has. On the other hand, for Moz, PA for a given page is far more dependent on the DA of the site that page is on. If we were to trust Moz's PA calculations, SEOrs should emphasize getting links from high DA sites....whereas if we were to trust Ahref's PA calculations, SEOrs should focus less on that and more on building links to whatever page they want to rank up (even if that page is on a low DA site). So what do you guys think? Do you agree more with Moz or Ahref's valuation of PA. Is PA of a page more dependent on the DA or more dependent on it's total inbound links?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
Linking from high ranking sub domain pages to less ranking main domain pages to benefit latter
Hi all, We have our product guide pages on sub domain which are years old, so have some backlinks and high ranking for the beand related queries. Now we created new guide pages on our main website and we want these new pages to rank top beating the old pages from sub domain. Again we can't deindex or rel canonical to solve the issue as there are some part of users still using the old pages. We are planning to give a link from every old page of sub domain to same new page on main domain. Will this linking increases the authority of new pages technically and helps in ranking better? Like we give a link to "Moz guide 1" page to "Moz guide 2" page to rank latter better. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Safari and IE killing our mobile ranking
My client's website does fairly well on mobile in a Google Search. So one day, my client is in a staff meeting and everyone does on search on their phones. The client’s website is nowhere on the 1st three pages. I get a call asking why. I tell the client that Google has maybe as high as 90% market share on mobile. Of course, their phones have the factory installed Safari and IE. Client says lots of people don’t change the factory settings on mobile . Question: How do we rate higher on lesser search engines?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
How to check which site performing well in google organic?
Hi All, Is it possible to check sites via any tool which sites performing good in google organic? Any site ... Is it possible via Alexa? My Concern is majorly for UK Ecommerce site... Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | pragnesh96390 -
Looking for Search Engine Ranking Factors more recent than 2013
The 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors study is a very useful study. However, it was completed more than two years ago, and a lot of algorthim updates have been made since then. Is there a more recent study of this than the one produced in 2013? Any and all information would be valuable. I am also trying to understand the importance of site speed as a ranking factor. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | JorgeUmana0 -
Not a mobile friendly website, will it hurt my rankings?
Unfortunately my website is not mobile friendly. As it is based on clickable links within an image there is no way to adapt it either. Now, I have heard Google is getting serious about mobile friendly design, how will this impact my ratings? My current analytics show 57% desktop, 24% mobile and 19% tablet. I really like the design of my site with the clickable images and would hate to have to change it because Google says so :-(. My website is http://tamarindobeachinfo.com
Algorithm Updates | | ijb0 -
What is the best way to organize a catergory for SEO purpsoes?
I work for a organic vitamin and supplement company and we are looking to rank for our categories by making more specific categories. For example we are going to try to add under the category "vitamin d" some smaller more relevant (longer-tail) categories like "spray vitamin d" and "vegan vitamin d" and try to rank instead for these searches and also searches containing words that we already have more authority from Google like "natural" or "organic". I know that putting the product pages a level deeper will only hurt us so I want to avoid that but I'm wondering if anyone has some advice on how to organize categories for longer tail keywords that we actually have a chance to rank for. Any help to figure this out would be greatly appreciated. Here is our page as it is currently, like I said we want to create sub categories that are effective for SEO, but also make searching and navigating the site easier. http://www.mynaturalmarket.com/Vitamin-D.html Thanks, ThatKwameGuy
Algorithm Updates | | ThatKwameGuy1 -
Google said that low-quality pages on your site may affect rankings on other parts
One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net
Algorithm Updates | | badabing0