Rankings UP, rankings DOWN - why?

[dealblogger]

Last week, I had 14 keywords go up and less than 5 go down. I was so thrilled!

Except this week, I had 10 go up and 14 go down!

How can I figure out what is going on? I am up and down 30+ spots with Google. I'd really like to stay up. My site is pretty new, just a few months. I am still fiddling around with settings trying to follow all the advice I read. (robot meta tags, title tag)

I didn't change any content in the last week. Does SEOmoz analyze the ranking data?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

First thing you might want to do is supplement weekly Moz rankings by using Webmaster Tools position data (under search queries) and you can filter by keyword - and you'll get you're average daily position straight from Google's data. You can also supplement Moz rankings data with something like AuthorityLabs. There's a list of rank checkers I put together here.

This is because it can be tricky to see what's going on with weekly data.

If/when you have that - it sounds like this is the "Google Dance" (when rankings jump all around). This can be common for new sites, especially as Google is just figuring it out etc.

Has traffic changed much?

I honestly would focus mostly on continuing to create the best site possible. Make sure each page is only targeting one main keyword.

-Dan

[inhouseninja]

It means for my site (APQC.org) for example if a site links to one of our pages the anchor text for the link is American Productivity & Quality Center and not 'site focused on productivity and benchmarking'

Branded keyword anchor text is Coca-Cola regular keyword anchor text is soda.

Get it? Believe me I know all these SEO terms and stuff can make your head spin. Hope this helps.

[dealblogger]

Sorry what do you mean by branded? I am new to this.

The anchor text was my website's name.

[inhouseninja]

I have no evidence to prove this theory but here goes: I think Google is beginning to weight brand centered anchor text higher and so it's really helping a site like mine whose links have brand anchor text.

If your anchor text on high value links isn't branded text that could be issue. Once again it's just my theory and feel free to punch holes in it if you like.

[dealblogger]

I rank better with bing and yahoo but I don't get many CLICKS.

I have no idea why I went up so much last week because I hadn't done much. I thought maybe because I got two quality backlinks on related blog with a PR of 5. But then why would they drop this week?

It is just frustrating not knowing!

[inhouseninja]

Since your site is new that could be a reason for rankings swing. If you did something with title tags that could be an issue. In my experience Title tags have been a huge problem and a huge area for gain once we got them fixed and well done.

Also are your Bing/Yahoo rankings very different from your google rankings? Our yahoo/Bing rankings are all over the place the last 4 months while google has been stable but I've had the opposite as well.