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
-
Hey guys, for some reason my homepage has gone down in rankings though other pages on my site have not.
This is not something I have ever seen before. The site is still indexed if I search for it directly, but not in top 100 rankings for keywords even though sub-pages are ranking for the given keyword. Changes I have made recently include site transfer to wordpress, force redirect http to https removal of www by redirect and adding new property instance in Google Search Console. I have checked htaccess file and sitemap and all seem fine. ideas? Site: https://dublinSEO.co
Technical SEO | | HappyApple840 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Local Keywords Not Ranking Well in a Geographic Location (but Rank Very Well Outside of Geographic Location)
Has anyone experienced, in the last few months, an issue where a website that once ranked well for 'local' terms in Google stopped ranking well for those terms (but saw a ranking decrease only within the geographic location contained within those keywords)? For example only, some 'root' keywords could be: Chicago dentist Chicago dentists dentist Chicago dentists Chicago What happens is that when a searcher searches from within the geographic area of Chicago, IL, the target website no longer ranks on the 1st page for these types of keyword phrases, but they used to rank in the top 3 perhaps. However, if someone was to search for the same keyword phrases from another city outside of Chicago or set a custom location (such as Illinois or even Milwaukee, WI perhaps) in their Google search, the target website appears to have normal (high) 1st page rankings for these types of terms. My own theory: At first I thought it was a Penguin related issue but the client's rankings overall haven't appeared to have been affected on the date(s) of Penguin updates. Authority Labs and Raven Tools (which uses Authority Labs data) did not detect any ranking decrease and still reports all the local keyword rankings as high on the 1st page of Google. However, when the client themselves goes to check their own rankings (as they are within that affected geographic area), they are no where to be found on the 1st page. :S After some digging I found that (one of) the company's Google Places listings (the main office listing) became an 'unsupported' status in Google Maps. So now I am thinking that this phenomenon is due to the fact that other listings are now appearing in search results for the same location. For example, in this case, an individual dentist's Google Places listing (who works within the dental office) is being displayed instead of the actual dental office's listing. Also, the dentist's name on the Google Places listing is being swapped out by Google with the name of the dental office, but if you click through to the Google Places listing, it shows the name of the individual Dentist. Anyone encounter a similar issue or have any other theories besides the Google Places issue?
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup0 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Penalities in a brand new site, Sandbox Time or rather a problem of the site?
Hi guys, 4 weeks ago we launched a site www.adsl-test.it. We just make some article marketing and developed a lots of functionalities to test and share the result of the speed tests runned throug the site. We have been for weeks in 9th google serp page then suddendly for a day (the 29 of february) in the second page next day the website home is disappeared even to brand search like adsl-test. The actual situalion is: it looks like we are not banned (site:www.adsl-test.it is still listed) GWT doesn't show any suggestion and everything looks good for it we are quite high on bing.it and yahoo.it (4th place in the first page) for adsl test search Anybody could help us to understand? Another think that I thought is that we create a single ID for each test that we are running and these test are indexed by google Ex: <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/w08ZMPKl3R or</cite> <cite>www.adsl-test.it/speedtest/P87t7Z7cd9</cite> Actually the content of these urls are quite different (because the speed measured is different) but, being a badge the other contents in the page are pretty the same. Could be a possible reason? I mean google just think we are creating duplicate content also if they are not effectively duplicated content but just the result of a speed test?
Technical SEO | | codicemigrazione0 -
Mini site links?
Can anyone point me to information about the "mini" site links on the Google search results or tell me how to get them set up? These aren't the full site links that show 3 by 3 under the first listing but small text links that appear for certain results. (See attached image for reference.) Are these something that can controlled/requested? NAj6E.png
Technical SEO | | DVanSchepen0 -
Strange rank behavior
Hi, I was ranked 16th (second page) on google italy for the keyword "realizzazione siti internet" (high and competitive serach volume) on an internel landing page: http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html and everything went fine, that was my strategy planed for placement of selected keyword.The same page was ranked also for more relating keyworks just few position far from the main keyword. Now starts the strange behavior, suddenly on the end of september google.it decides to switch the landing page to the home page of the site! (absolutely not optimized for "realizzazione siti internet") and the for the others releated keyword the url disappear completely from the serp. Checking back into my link building database I found that some guys of my staff inserted wrong new links with the exact keyword "realizzazione siti internet" pointing to the home! not so good! those wrong links are about 10 with exact keyword and another 10 with releated keyword. So I decided to continue inserting links pointing to the right landing page http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html to balance and to let google switch back to exact url. moreover I also tried to remove some wrong link with a little rate of succes 😞 Could somebody please tell me why now at about 45 day past the "landing switch error" the problem is not solved? somebody has suggestion or strategies to apply? thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Filolari1 -
Why Does this Site Rank for so Many Keywords?
I was doing some research today and kept coming across this site sylvane.com I checked OSE and found that it only has a DA of 37 PA of 35, and only 79 linking domains (966 links total). I got to looking and there are a few links like this http://lulala.us/twxoops/html/userinfo.php?uid=303 Anyway, accroding to SEMRush, this site ranks for over 6,000 keywords. I ran content on a couple of their high ranking pages and the content is not unique, at least not very unique on the pages I checked. What is so special about that site that google is giving it so much love? I am not trying to call them out, I just want to know what this site is doing to garner the favor of google when I have a site in the same niche with a higher DA, PA, linking domains, and social signals.
Technical SEO | | CharlesMontgomery0