aakk9999 - 1:38 am on Feb 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

When the light is RED, do you notice any significant position changes in your B & C sites? I don't. This is were the is a complex paradox. SERP's "normal", traffic junk.

This might be completely off the mark, but as many here said they see unusual fluctuation (drop) in sales but steady traffic and rankings check up... we know that Google has classified queries broadly into navigational, informational and transactional. Lets discount navigational queries for the moment. What if Google, according to the immediate previous searches of the visitor, and even more, according to the immediate previous behaviour of the visitor on other sites (where it can tell what pages they are visiting), tries to decide in what "mood" the searcher is.

So if I am in "information gathering" stage and I get to your site, I will not buy. If I am in "buying" stage and get to your site, I might buy. But if Google serves your normal "rankings" to visitors in "information gathering" stage, or to visitors in "unknown" stage (cannot tell if I am in information gathering or buying stage), but your site does not appear in SERPs (or appear less) when Google is more certain the visitor is in "buying mode" stage, then the result might be that you get the same traffic, you see your normal ranking when checking yourself or asking someone to check, but you do get less sales.

This could be widely off the mark but this is one way I could perhaps explain this "paradox" being described in a quote above. The question is - can Google crunch data that quickly and so well to make this distinction and serve different SERPs based on immediate previous visitor behaviour - and also - if it can, why would it do it? Why would it filter your site for "buying mode" visitors when your site is a transactional site too...?