Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site recently achieved a high SERP for a popular keyword here in the UK - making us seriously happy bunnies. The postion has been a bit up and down in since we achieved this, occasionally disappearing for a few hours.
Well, it's just disappeared again - a few hours after we had a problem on the site which caused our site response times to go from milliseconds to minutes. Now, this might be complete co-incidence, it might not. The site is fixed, but our SERP is still non-existant, nearly 48 hours after.
Has anyone else experienced a direct relationship between SERP and response times? Is this just co-incidence?
Also have other people experienced unstable SERPs in the early days of getting a good position, or are we just unlucky?
Cheers,
Minty.
For your overall question, I've seen hints for several years that slow server response could be one factor in the algorithm. Certainly googlebot does get that measurement. It's usually not a major factor, but a url with response time measured in minutes would clearly not be something Google wants to show to their end user.
Also have other people experienced unstable SERPs in the early days of getting a good position, or are we just unlucky?
Sure - we recently got one site to move from #9 to #2 on a very good money term - and since then it's been yo-yoing like crazy between top of the page, middle of the page, and bottom of the page. Seems like every week brings something new.
According at least one of their patents, Google could be giving special attention and analysis to a url that moves rapidly and starts to get a lot more impressions (or clicks) in the SERPs.
