Volatile SERPS?
-
I have a new client whose rank is jumping around a lot. I took over the account 7 weeks ago, but they'd been doing SEO with a decent provider. They switched to me because they thought he wasn't working very hard and he's not very nice.
I just took them on in December and they started out at #18. On Dec 24 they were at 9, Jan 1 at 12, Jan 2 at 14, Jan 3 at 24, Jan 12 at 19, Jan 15 at 28, Jan 16 at 25, Jan 19 at 28 and today at 24.
Some of the really bad black hattish providers have bounced up to the top. Any idea what's going on?
-
It's important to consider that competitors may frequently make changes that impact rankings. Even if the site you're managing has been optimized and remains unchanged, competitors may be implementing various strategies behind the scenes that can affect its ranking position.
-
If the serps are volatile, it's often because of a significant Google algorithm update.
Also, check if your business has incurred a Google manual penalty or not. An SEO agency can check this for you.
-
We're tracking 5 phrases. Two have improved and two are static, but this free-falling one is our most important.
They are very deficient in backlinks. The competition started years ago, and even the previous SEO guy, according to ahrefs, got only 36 links in a whole year. We can't beat the competition on total links, but I can beat them on higher quality. I'm a part of the local blogging community and have done a ton of work with local non-profits.
Even so, it seems more volatile than it should. A competitor jumped 8 positions whose top link is from a parked domain page advertising porn sites. Not a single quality link according to ahrefs.
Then I saw this thread in webmaster world talking about some glitchiness and wondered if anyone else had seen it. https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4880306.htm
-
Also keep in mind the competition may be changing things frequently. Even if the site you're managing has been optimized and it's just sitting there without additional changes, competitors may be doing all sorts of things in the background, affecting rank.
-
are you tracking one keyword?
if it's a competitive niche, then SERP fluctuations behind the first page are not uncommon.
tbh it looks more like the website is losing positions rather than jumping around.
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
-
Negative News in SERP results?
Hey guys, We did reputation management back in March 2017. We basically built high quality links to online assets such as linkedin, twitter, facebook, positive PR articles and other web properties in order to rank them higher then negative PR. However there was 0 change (the link building was solid). And the negative PR remains in the top 10 with also positive new articles about the site. At this point, i believe that Google is keeping the negative PR in the top 10 to keep balanced SERP results. Does anyone know if this is something Google does to balance positive and negative results? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs
Hello, I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some. The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
SERPS showing wrong page
I have optimised a homepage for two keywords. I optimised this a few weeks ago and the page has been crawled by Google, also before this it was already reasonably well optimised for these terms. However, the homepage is not appearing in Google for these terms. Instead two other random pages on the site are appearing for these terms that have not been optimised for these keywords and have few mentions of the keywords on the pages!?? These pages have a lower DA and lower inbound links than the homepage. The homepage is showing for other lower competition keywords. Could anyone offer me some insight into this? The homepage content has been posted on other websites by a former SEO consultant - to a business directory for one? Could duplicate content be causing this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absolutely170 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
How to get head office address appear on SERPS under brand serps?
Hi all, We have different offices in UK in different cities. Until last month our main office was appearing on Google results but lately i noticed that our other office is appearing on serps when i search with brand name. We have 3 addresses registered with Google Places. Any ideas how we can get head office to appear on serps under our brand name? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
I'm having an exteremly hard time with SERPs despite my best efforts. Can someone help?
My site is www.drupalgeeks.org Our traffic is going up but our SERPS are not. We simply don't rank for any of our targeted keywords. I have covered nearly every white hat SEO strategy possible. Our site has a great social presence (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), we write blogs regularly, and even guest blog. We have a YouTube channel, an RSS feed. We've cleaned up page speed times, set 301 redirects, checked for duplicate content. We use Bing and Google webmaster tools and have submitted a sitemap. We are indexed and webmaster tools see our keywords as relevant in our content. We have a robots.txt file configured properly. The only thing I can think of is that our services pages also display (as a truncated summary) on our homepage. Could this be considered duplicate content, and is this causing a problem? Is there anything else we can do? Or are we missing something vital? We thank you in advance for your help! Candice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus0 -
My brand is not ranking on Android Google SERPs
In the new blog post here, she links to mobilemoxie, a site which allows you to do searches on various different smartphones. I tried a search for my brand, "ixl.com" on an iPhone 4 and a Android phone, the Motorola Droid X. On the iPhone, our brand appears in #1 like normal, but on the Android phone, our result doesn't appear on the first page. Any ideas as to why this would be the case? We're currently developing a mobile version of our site but we don't have one yet. Could that be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0