Awesome results for two days than disappearing again - interpretation?

[Trax]

What is this supposed to tell me?
My site, a half year online, 2002 domain started ranking well for some keywords and the top rankings disappeared for a couple of month. then, 4 days ago, the traffic quadruples and stayed this way for 2 days. I thought... great, finally.
but nothing... for the past two days rankings are gone again

what should this tell me? what kind of penalty could this be or what kind of interpretation do you have for this situation?

any help appreciated.

[tedster]

I wish I knew something definitive about this behavior. All I can say is it is happening to more than one site. My guess is that it's some kind of statistical testing to see if the lower ranking should be changed.

More ideas and input on this are quite welcome.

[edited by: tedster at 3:54 am (utc) on June 19, 2009]

[trinorthlighting]

This is simple ted, Everflux- constant algo changes, constant crawling, recalculation, etc..

I think Google is making a lot of tweaks and it just takes time to sort itself out.

[Pico_Train]

I noticed something similar about a week or 2 ago. Normal result anywhere from 13-20, then was suddenly on page 1 for a couple of days, no back to normal 13-20 range.

I didn't personally do anything to the page, get any links or that sort of thing.

I also saw the same thing for another site yesterday and today. Position 5 around 7:30am, back to page 2 on the next click of the search button.

What is it interesting is that I do the search in the toolbar, with .com as default. Result is page 2, no. 14. Then I change the .com to .co.za in the address bar without changing anything else in the URL and I get position 5. Click search button again on .co.za and I get position 22.

So Trax there are all sorts of things at play. Did you do your searches in the exact same manner each time or did you fiddle like I did above? Fiddling throws different parameters into play!

[tedster]

It might be useful to know if your ranking is changing at the same data center or if queries done at different times are seeing results from different Google IP addresses. You can install the Show IP add-on to Firefox and keep records of which IP addresses are reporting.

[Pico_Train]

Nope, they're back!

www.google.com - 66.102.9.104,66.102.9.99,66.102.9.147
www.google.co.za after address bar change - 209.85.227.147,209.85.227.103,209.85.227.99,209.85.227.104

www.google.co.za after submit click - 209.85.227.147,209.85.227.103,209.85.227.99,209.85.227.104

.CO.ZA IPs are the same .com different.

So clicking the submit button obviously changes the $_POST/$_GET data and hence the search result, no surprise there even before writing this.

[tedster]

Google's load balancing is also a significant factor.

[waynet]

I have a similar experience as Trax. I have a site that has been around since 2002 that took a big loss of google traffic since last year. This week I noticed that Google traffic increased five fold for about four days straight to about where it was last year. Looking at the SERPs basically all pages on the site were performing much better, then yesterday it all returned back to the low level.

It seem like there was some sort of dampening affect for my site that was temporarily turned off during that time.

[Trax]

i see some good ideas here but it essentially it boils down to the question what I can do on my end, if anything at all?
keep building links the normal way and wait for a manual review to lift any possible penalties? does anyone think its an authority issue, still?
thx so far

[Pico_Train]

Hard to say Trax. Keep building good links and add good relevant content. Other than that, maybe ask another peer to review your site and see if they can find anything.

[Trax]

@pico... fundamentally i think my site is fine... a review sadly wont find out if google detected artificial linkbuying or whatever caused this penalty.