My site goes from ranking at #7 to #18 back and forth, daily
-
I am using a anonymous browser to check this, or different computers. Each day it changes from #7 on page one, to #18 on page two. This has been going on daily for two weeks. Anyone know why would this happen?
thanks
-
Google test things from time to time and this something causes a fluctuation on few of the key terms and websites that are ranking for those key terms...I think you should be too much possessive about rankings and should not really check tit on regular basis...
I think you should stop thinking about this for few days and then you will notice the rankings stabled at one point... normally fluctuations are the market of the process so don’t take this too seriously.
-
Firstly, I'd set up rank tracking so you don't have to worry about this on a daily basis. Use the SEOMoz campaign tracker, which will track your rankings on a weekly basis. You can also sign up for a free account at Authority Labs, Rank Ranger, or many other rank tracking tools out there.
Google may be trying to determine where your site should be ranked. They could be testing CTR rates on the various serps, and based on that determine how it should be ranked. Also, they could be having some crawl issues of your site, or some temporary link building or other signals that would be causing fluctuations. It could just also be a rather volatile SERP with a lot of movement.
Without knowing what the keyword is and the competitiveness of the SERP, it's hard to give you a 100% answer, but hopefully my questions will help steer you in the right direction of what to look at.
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
-
Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?
I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank. Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc.. Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google. Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed. I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile. One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc.. Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc.. Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling? Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings? I am just at my wits end on this matter. 😕
Technical SEO | | Dutko23851 -
My site is not being regularly crawled?
My site used to be crawled regularly, but not anymore. My pages aren't showing up in the index months after they've been up. I've added them to the sitemap and everything. I now have to submit them through webmaster tools to get them to index. And then they don't really rank? Before you go spouting off the standard SEO resolutions... Yes, I checked for crawl errors on Google Webmaster and no, there aren't any issues No, the pages are not noindex. These pages are index,follow No, the pages are not canonical No, the robots.txt does not block any of these pages No, there is nothing funky going on in my .htaccess. The pages load fine No, I don't have any URL parameters set What else would be interfereing? Here is one of the URLs that wasn't crawled for over a month: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-st-louis
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Rankings drop after Panda
Hi All, My site dropped completely out of the SERPS on September 27th. I've tried everything I know to do (re-wrote all content, disavow links tool, filed DCMA complaints, de-optimized on-page content, made anchor text less aggressive, etc). Can you all please take a look at www.doctorloanusa.com and let me know what you think the problem is and how much you'd charge to help? Keywords used to be: doctor loans, physician loans. I ranked 2 or 3 for those keywords consistently for over 4 years. I know I need more content, but I feel like it's a waste of time creating it. If a thin site was the issue, wouldn't I at least rank SOMEWHERE in the 1000 results? Thanks for your consideration. At my wits end.
Technical SEO | | Cary_Forest0 -
Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
Hi everyone, I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search. http://www.nfsmn.com Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn" If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around. Thanks Eric
Technical SEO | | reynoldsdesign0 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0 -
How to setup tumblr blog.site.com to give juice to site.com
Is it possible to get a subdomain blog.site.com that is on tumblr to count toward site.com. I hoped I could point it in webmaster tools like we do www but alas no. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | oznappies0 -
Site problem
I moved a site earlier on in the year to a better server www.keyrs.co.uk, my main keywords being equity release - equity release calculator and equity release schemes. Since this happened the ranking have gone down and the schemes and calculator terms and have hit positions 7-8 when they were 2-3. basically my question is open to all, i am looking to see what the problem is with these pages as it is driving me nuts. All tools on SEO moz show the pages are doing well, however i must be missing something. Mike
Technical SEO | | TomBarker820