SERP and Google - Webmaster Forums - Webmaster forum for HTML, PHP, ASP, CSS and more

highpowersites · 05-23-2008, 02:19 PM

Hi everyone:

I have been working on SEO for a few of our websites over the years and have had great sucess. One of our websites has been on the first page of Google for some very competitive keywords for a long time. For our best keyword we have been in the number 3 spot on Google for many many months. Lately, I have seen it drop to 5 or 6 and then back up to 3 or 4 but it keeops changing. Then, 2 days ago it went to 8, then back to 6, now it is at number 7 spot. I have never seen so much fluctuation ever. It changes daily. Is there something going on with Google that I am not aware of?

This site is number three for allinanchor for this keyword. It should be higher than number 7.

Thanks for the help,

Scott

hershell · 05-28-2008, 04:17 AM

Your site is listing in top 10 ranking in google thats really good.I hope you are targeting with the keywords which have less competition and many searches in a day.but if you are targeting with some keywords which have strong competition and many of the websites are targeting this keyword then i think you should nothing to worry about.Because google put the website high in SERP with high priority when it crawls to your site and find it with high priority then it is places high else low.So keep concentrating on your work and wait for some positive results.

PaulB-IOM · 05-29-2008, 07:52 AM

Google has a thing for fresh content, I quite often find that when my competition update they may jump ahead for a day or so but then fall back after that. It's just all part of the fun

hershell · 05-29-2008, 08:17 AM

Yeah thats true that fresh content in your website helps so much to place website high in ranking.Content should be updated regularly in some time of interval.

Also define keywords in your content which you are targeting for your website and make sure that your keyword is defined in the title also and unique and no longer than 65 characters.

Arleigh · 06-06-2008, 03:30 AM

Yup, I agree.. Google really loves fresh and quality content so it's really important to update your content regularly so that your site will be more visible to search engines...

MrCat · 06-06-2008, 05:06 PM

If the keywords you are optimizing for are popular and has lots of competition - chances are your competitors are doing their SEO as well. This could be very well a cause of such fluctuation.

Nathan Malone · 06-09-2008, 06:23 PM

My advice would be to constantly work on improving and adding to the content of your site, as well as continually building incoming links.

Then, just check the position in the SERPS every week or two, to get an idea of how you are doing long-term.

There will be some fluctuations, and I wouldn't be concerned about day-to-day changes in the rankings.

henery008 · 06-10-2008, 09:08 AM

if we are talking about SERP for certain keywords we can assure or guarantee that those key words will always be in top, and many more factors are there to be consider as far as ranking is concerned but if regular update with unique content is going on then we can expect good result after all in SEO we use to say that content is the King

kiwi36 · 06-17-2008, 01:17 PM

I agree that google like fresh content

BUT
what about a site that you just dont want to add any more content? as in it says it all?

something google loves even more than fresh content is cleaning up your old content, making the pages more difined
most of all making sure that all the meta tags are there and the alt tags on photos plus the clean well thought out directory structor.

these things are the most important thing and 95% of web pages just dont have all the "must do" checked off, that means unless your site is at number 1 then you havent done it 100% to googles liking.

now just to back up some of what I have said google these two words "fishing" and "Bangkok" take the and out of the middle and then go to images.
the first 2 positions are from a site I have been building. now if anyone was to take the time to check that site has
NO LINKS
it has very little content.
it has a page rank of 0

not bad out of 195,000 images

by the way I have a total of 7 images on the first page 2 are from my new site the others are from my old site, the new site just blitzed the old site.

ok so what has this to do with the changing google position?

as people put up new content and change pages the average keyword density of the pages changes so a wee position change happens as other web pages become more optimized than you.

keyword density is ranked back a long way I dont know how far back google looks but basicly its the old bell curve. if you look at the top twenty sites and look at there keyword density then you will find that the top sites are around the same as the number 1 site.

keyword density would be even more important if all the sites have the same links and also just as well set up with meta and alt tags also h1 ect. at that point keyword density plays the major part.

so how do you stop your site jumping around?
you cant !
but you can do a little bit to slow it down, by dominating the top ten with webpages that you decide, example, I work in the fishing industry so I use the IGFA forum this is a .org and well ranked, with a posting there it can go top ten easy, ok so two pages and I now have 2 igfa top ten postings, get two of my own pages there and now well on the way to guiding the keyword density count for those search words.

there is a little of what I have learnt over the last couple of years.
now some might not agree with what I write buy that is fine as I seem to hit the top 3 in google when I try so that within its self is saying something :-)

remember your tags, keywords, url, anchour text, links, and you are away in no time!

R552S · 11-04-2008, 04:41 AM

Google never releases their algorithm to anyone what they are doing it's their own secrets.You just do a steady seo job regularly then your site will remain as it before.