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.
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pls i want to seo my site
thanks
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
@saleh
The site pages Google shows it has indexed is usually inaccurate.
Useful Information, Thanks…
Thanx for info
@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.
dear, this post is very useful for webmasters like us. thanks for giving suggestion
@saleh
how do you count the number of pages indexed by Google? and what do you mean by “some other sites going up?”
It can also depend on where you are: the Google datacenter you are using.
How do i get my site on youe mapping site?
Thanks
Martin
Thanks for your informative post. How many types of Google bots there are?
how to do SEO ? How to bring in to 1st page during search ?
I did already subscribe with you and I wish I can get better results with you.
thank you for .
Thanks for the very helpful information!
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.
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!
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.
Great article! I have recently experiences fluctuations on my webpage which is very frustrating.
Regards,
Visitkort
Thanks for the free information:)
Thanks for shearing tips about ranking fluctuations. Is there any rank fluctuations because of over promotion? I mean building too many links withing one week or one month.
Indeed. You don’t want to build too many links at once. How many? I can’t really tell. In our company, we don’t do more than 150 links/mo/client.
Yes. I’m also building links slowly.
But sometimes, our website de-indexed due to some Social Bookmarking links.
Hi
I’m a Blogger and also an SEO expert, some day i got many visitors on my blog and suddenly someday my ranking goes down, somebody was telling me it is because of Dynamic Ranking, is this correct?
I’m not sure I believe you can create too many links at a time. Firstly because it’s not the links you create but when they are picked up by google. Google will find these links on a random basis, 20 one day, none the next, 50 the next day etc. Secondly, if sites were punished for getting a tremendous amount of backlinks over night, how would Google be able to offer it’s readers the latest up to date news? Say for example someone put up some risque video of Britney Spears and it got 200,000 backlinks in a week, then you typed in Britney spears in Google, it would come first in the rankings. Now for sure, it would drop away as the backlinks dropped but only in proportion. What I’m trying to say is, pump out the backlinks but you gotta be consistant. 100 a day or 500 a day but every day and more or less the same amount.
Thanks for the interesting article.
I have seen my indexed links vary on a daily basis and enough to vary my position ranking several spots. Google and yahoo both seem to do this and your explanation of them changing their algorithm daily does seem to explain that. I have a small site (4 pages) six months old and cannot seem to get a page rank. Is this this the reason?
This is not the reason for not getting your page rank. Google will update page ranks once or twice a year.
BTW… the links on this blog are no-follow.
I have found that my homepage seems to have been copied and used on other websites. My homepage has been on the first page of Google for a number of months, but over the last weekend it dropped to 14. It is now fluctuating between 14 and 24 almost daily.
I want to totally rewrite my homepage content, but keeping the title and keywords and external linking the same. Do you think it will cause my homepage to drop even further?
Thank you
Lin
@Lin Davenport
Hi Lin. Sorry to hear that. It is not likely your rankings may have dropped because of the duplicate content; probably because your competition is more active.
But to answer your question, rewriting your content is a positive step and will not cause you to lose further rankings.
I wish you the best.