Recent ranking fluctuations - happening every month

[experienced]

i own a very old site 6 yr old, PR4, around 50K unique every month ranks high with most of the keywords. since 2 months i am experiencing complete down in ranking for some time and then site comes back on the same position in a week or so.

it was down in feb 1st week and came back now again it is down since 4 days. i check the webmaster tool and did not find anything reported by google except some pages with short title and all.. they have been corrected as well...google showing sitelinks generated on 13 march 09 as well..

i really lost 25% to 30% businesss every month due to this ranking down, i would say.. Is anybody there experiencing the same..

thanks for the support in advance.

[tedster]

Have you read this thread: Yo-Yo Effect - Observations and Understandings [webmasterworld.com]

The original Yo-Yo observations were about day-to-day shifts, but in more recent times we've also heard about a kind of yo-yo that goes on a longer cycle, more like your description. Yes, you have company. Why this happens to some sites and not others - or how to get out of it - is not well understood. The best advise I know of is rather generic: keep strengthening all your quality signals.

Right before this began, did you take some major actions that you intended to be SEO?

[JS_Harris]

An out of the box suggestion, monitor the number of links leaving your index page. If you're writing articles and the latest articles are showing up on your index page you need to remember two things.

#1 - the index page content will be in constant flux and so it will change in rankings for various keywords as the content changes.

#2 - the number of links (internal or external) appearing on the index affects the flow of "juice" to all links from the main page, internal links included.

I suspect that your site is fluctuating as your content on key pages is, it happens a lot with blogs. You can stabilize the effect a little by including solid static text above the fluctuating text on many pages.

[experienced]

hello tedster,

Thanks for the reference. I have not done any change so far. Simple tring to add some value pages and sections there. home page has quite good and original content. and whenever we put inks there, we add up the additional content there. we dont remove the old content part.

for the quality signals, what i understood is, i am adding up the more original content to the pages which are having little less content Plus some quality links.

this is true that i have good amount of liinks (sub domain external and internal)on home page, but due to the big site reason, i think i have to have it. although i use to change or replace those links with the new ones when new section comes in.

am i thinking in the right direction..?

hello JS_Harris,

this is not a blog but a 6 yr website. and we dont change the home page content so frequently, and if changed, it is a very small part.

thanks

[tedster]

i use to change or replace those links with the new ones when new section comes in.

am i thinking in the right direction..?

I'm not clear about this. Are you changing home page links and dropping links that point to subdomains that are still active?

[experienced]

i mean to say if i have 10 links to 1 sub domain and there is something new to be placed additionally, and also we need to have the limited links, then sometime remove 2 to 4 old links and add up the new 3 to 4 new link. not a big change at all. and when i remove any link(s), i make sure that are linked from other pages to get indexed easily.

[tedster]

You definitely don't want the total links on the home page to swell beyond reasonable levels. So what you explained sounds like a good approach.

[experienced]

thankyou..

i am not sure why this is happening with my site. yoyo effect i dont think that this should be applicable on a 6 yr old site as i believe during 6 yrs google also accept the sites as a good entity if this is ranking good since a long time and having original content and all..

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 17, 2009]

[tedster]

I've seen the yo-yo with extremely powerful sites - the kind that have millions of natural backlinks and the company has been in business for a century. So don't "take it personally" or think of it as a penalty. It certainly is a novel way to treat rankings.

Google is up to something here, and it's not easy to sort out the "logic" that fuels it. It may even be wrapped in with the whole brand update issue [webmasterworld.com] we've been, discussing and whatever that recent change to the algo is all about.

[experienced]

Yes right...

how do you think if the main site links its many sub domains. Does google counts them same as external link to other site or it is just a local link although the path is absolute.

we have many links to our sub domains from the main site home page and inner pages...

[tedster]

There are quite a few good discussions about Google and subdomains, available through a site search [google.com]

[experienced]

thanks for the reference.

Very helpful. and as my sub domains are very logical and not the keyword based but the region based. and entire mini site is related to that sub domain only. so i think this should not be a problem. we will just watch the number of links to sub domains.

Thanks