Ranking fluctuation
-
According to Miles Rank tracking I have a keyword that is fluctuating by 5 or 6 positions in a 24-hour period every time it goes 10 down to 15 and back to 10 again with very little stopping point in between and keeps fluctuating like that.
As far as I know the website is stable it uses Magento 1.9 and is a fixed category page.
The page URL is relatively new as we migrated from an old site with a different URL structure I added 301s at server level from the old page URL to the new one.
There is only two things I can think that can be the problem -
1. Lack of links directly to the page (there is literally only one or two)
2. Loading speed problemBut I don't see any of these would cause a 5 position fluctuation regularly every day.
But do you have any thoughts?
Thanks in advance.
-
As Martin has said (and others in the helpful link he provided), it's perfectly normal for fluctuations to occur. Before you decide that it's a problem with your site or page, you should check to if your competition is experiencing similar fluctuations. Check out Mozcast too. There has been a lot of fluctuation in the SERPs lately.
-
Ranking fluctuations are quite common and there's not much you can do about it specifically. However, if it's every day like this, there could be some crawling issue every time Google tries to crawl the page. Try and look into it deeper in Google Search Console.
In general, the best way would be to build domain authority by creating quality content and acquiring backlinks to get your website to #1 position. It'll be more important to Google and won't be messing with your site as much as now.
You can also read more information in this thread (especially in the Takeshi's answer):
https://moz.com/community/q/why-keyword-ranking-fluctuate
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
-
Rank regional homepages using canonicals and hreflangs
Here’s a situation I’ve been puzzling with for some time: The situation
Technical SEO | | dmduco
Please consider an international website targeting 3 regions. The real site has more regions, but I simplified the case for this question. screenshot1.png There is no default language. The content for each regional version is meant for that region only. The website.eu page is dynamic. When there is no region cookie, the page is identical to website.eu/nl/ (because Netherlands is the most important region) When there is a region cookie (set by a modal), there is a 302 redirect to the corresponding regional homepage What we want
We want regional Google to index the correct regional homepages (eg. website.eu/nl/ on google.nl), instead of website.eu.
Why? Because visitors surfing to website.eu sometimes tend to ignore the region modal and therefor browse the wrong version.
For this, I set up canonicals and hreflangs as described below: screenshot2.png The problem
It’s 40 days now since the above hreflangs and canonicals have been setup, but Google is still ranking website.eu instead of the regional homepages.
Search console’s report for website.eu: screenshot3.png Any ideas why Google doesn’t respect our canonical? Maybe I’m overlooking something in this setup (combination of hreflangs and canonicals might be confusing)? Should I remove the hreflangs on the dynamic page, because there is no self-referencing hreflang? Or maybe it’s because website.eu has gathered a lot of backlinks over the years, whereas the regional homepages have much less, which might be why Google chooses to ig nore the canonical signals? Or maybe it’s a matter of time and I just need to wait longer? Note: I’m aware the language subfolders (eg. /be_nl) are not according to Google’s recommendations. But I’ve seen similar setups (like adobe.com and apple.com) where the regional homepage is showing ok. Any help appreciated!0 -
Why my website sudden gone down its ranking?
From today morning my site rank down in Google search engine http://watchwrestling.co/ Most of the pages are on the top rank of google but now it gone how can i fix that issue
Technical SEO | | watchwrestling0 -
Terrible branded ranking
I am at lost. My website has been live for about 3 months. Typing my name or my direct page title into google puts me on page 15. My site is indexed by google, a site:mywebsitename search - produces 202 results. My on page SEO isn't amazing buy it isn't terrible either. The website has 35+, 500 words+ reviews and a few incoming links from some occasional link building. 0 duplicate content. The website is animexcess.com
Technical SEO | | WebsiteEditor
My thoughts on what might be causing the problem, i am hoping that someone with a bit more SEO knowledge than myself can point me in the right direction. During development, i had duplicate content up on the site as placeholder while i wrote my own - All duplicate content has been removed for about 3 months now, but can this still be affecting me ranking? and to this extent? The entire website is in a sub-directory with 301 redirects - can this be affecting my ranking to this extent? The domain had a prior owner. Waybackmachine tells me that the domain had a page up in 2007. I bought it in 2010. If the prior owner built up a bad rep on this domain can is still be the cause for poor ranking 6 years later? I cannot file a reconsideration request since there are no manual actions taken against my site in WMT, any way around this? Its only been three months. I know 3 months isn't a very long time in the google ranking world but my my 2 week old, built in 1 week, secondary website is ranking on page 1 for some pretty solid terms, so i don't think 3 months is to short a time to expect a bit of results. My website is being crawled daily.
Any advice on how to move forward with fixing my website ranking will be much obliged. Thank you.0 -
Rankings for Google Play Pages
Hey all, I'm relatively new here and certainly new to posting in the forums and interacting with the community but I hope to be much more active in the coming months. I have what might be a silly question regarding search results for a Google Play store-specific query. The company in question has their main North American app that's been out for a month and a half and then an International version that was released just a few days ago. If you run a Google search (NOT a search witin Google Play) for 'Google Play Company Name' the more recent (but less used and ultimately less important, at least for the time being) International app is higher in the SERP than the more used and reviewed North American app. I'm guessing that this is something that will correct itself over the next week as the North American app establishes itself as the more important of the two, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask just in case there's something they can do to affect the results a little quicker. Any advice, input or just a verification of my guess would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Is a state name in the URL hindering national rankings?
My client's site has a state name in the URL, but he practices on a national level. Is this going to limit rankings to that state and is it worth creating a whole new site with just the keywords in the URL? Thank you, Donna 🙂
Technical SEO | | WebMarketingHUB0 -
What is campaign based rank tracking tool? How to use it?
I'm having difficulties with SEOmoz Rank Tracker tool. During last month, it hasn't worked properly. I was suggested to use "campaign based rank tracking tool"- I would like to learn if anyone has already used it? Thanks, Sema
Technical SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
SEOMOZ Ranking
Im pretty new to all this so hopefuly im going the right way ive been using SEOMOZ Pro for about 3 weeks. I have a website and a blog, I noticed that my website (flash based) was not doing very well but my blog was doing well. So i decided to turn my blog into a website for my main website and my old website into another category for my services. So I have now transferred everything over to my blog and on website grader I have got my rating upto 74/100 from 17/100 which is higher than anyone else in my keyword, my traffic ranking is higher but Im not even in the top 50 in google, they do have more backlins than me significanlty more but I am working on it. So the question is it the backlinks that help MOZ ranking, and how long does it take before google recognises my links to give me a position on google. My keywords are coventry wedding photographer and my site is rnblog.co.uk
Technical SEO | | robanewman0 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0