Why Do My Google Search Results Fluctuate?

Many of you may have seen your site’s ranking on Google Search Results (SR’S) fluctuate and you have wondered why. Recently, one of our subscribers asked me the same question and I thought it would be beneficial to post an answer for everyone.

I have personally seen Google search results fluctuations since I started my SEO career. For one thing, if it wasn’t for Google changing the search results pages, none of our clients would have had top of Google rankings, right?

But what we mean here is gaining and losing first page or top positions in cycles. Normally, this doesn’t happen for very competitive keywords, as top players always have SEO experts on their sides. But for less competitive keywords, this is a common phenomenon.

Here are some reasons that you see your site’s rankings fluctuate on Google:

1- Posting fresh content: Google values fresh content on sites. Adding a new story to your blog, posting a new article on your site or simply rewriting your site’s homepage could trigger Google bots to move you up the scales a few notch. Same could go for your competitors. However, the improvements in rankings don’t last that often unless you keep on updating your site’s content.

2- Optimization Removal: if our SEO team has optimized your site and you have over-written the optimization work by uploading your old files to the server, you have caused your site’s rankings to be dropped. In this case, you can ask our team to re-upload the files.

3- Different Google bots: each Google bot (spider) uses a slightly different algorithm; so, theoretically, when different spiders visit your site, they would rank your site according to their algorithm.

4- Duplicate content: this is also more likely a theory as I have not seen the proof of it, but I was just reading Google Webmaster Help and someone had claimed if your site’s content is copied by someone else, it could fluctuate your rankings. However, what I’ve seen with duplicate content is that rankings will drop to 10+ pages of Google SR’s.

We appreciate your comments/questions.

Popularity: 38%

  1. May 24th, 2010 at 11:06 | #1

    pls i want to seo my site

    thanks

  2. May 24th, 2010 at 12:15 | #2

    what i meant is not my site ranking

    imean the number of pages in my sites those has been indexed in google is going down and i see some other dites going up i just wanna know the reason y is this happening

  3. May 24th, 2010 at 12:36 | #3

    @saleh

    The site pages Google shows it has indexed is usually inaccurate.

  4. May 24th, 2010 at 17:09 | #4

    Useful Information, Thanks…

  5. May 24th, 2010 at 17:53 | #5

    Thanx for info

  6. May 24th, 2010 at 19:05 | #6

    @saleh : the reasons are -perhaps- your competitor has change their website (onpage optimization) and also increasing their relevant backlinks. Another reason is about duplicate content that will drop our page if we copy paste from another web.

  7. May 24th, 2010 at 19:10 | #7

    dear, this post is very useful for webmasters like us. thanks for giving suggestion

  8. May 24th, 2010 at 21:16 | #8

    @saleh
    how do you count the number of pages indexed by Google? and what do you mean by “some other sites going up?”

  9. May 24th, 2010 at 21:26 | #9

    It can also depend on where you are: the Google datacenter you are using.

  10. May 25th, 2010 at 00:09 | #10

    How do i get my site on youe mapping site?

    Thanks

    Martin

  11. Nicole
    May 25th, 2010 at 01:15 | #11

    Thanks for your informative post. How many types of Google bots there are?

  12. May 25th, 2010 at 03:29 | #12

    how to do SEO ? How to bring in to 1st page during search ?

  13. May 25th, 2010 at 06:42 | #13

    I did already subscribe with you and I wish I can get better results with you.
    thank you for .

  14. June 10th, 2010 at 09:19 | #14

    Thanks for the very helpful information!

  15. June 16th, 2010 at 19:02 | #15

    This post certainly explained the reason why websites gain rankings on Google and other search engine. Knowing this is essential because you’ll know what to do next if your website’s ranking decline. Thanks for sharing.

  16. August 13th, 2010 at 10:40 | #16

    Somewhat off topic, but I notice daily fluctuations in the number of my site’s pages that Google shows as indexed (using site:siteexample.com). Surely this must affect my ranking results too, as I doubt an un-indexed page could show up in someone’s Google search results. Can you explain why indexed pages fluctuate so frequently (and often dramatically). thanks!

  17. August 13th, 2010 at 11:29 | #17

    site:www.example.com and link:www.example.com are not very accurate. I wouldn’t worry about them as long as you have submitted a sitemap.xml to Google Webmaster Tools.

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