Site jumping up and down organic rankings

[mammoo]

Hi all,

Hopefully you can help me as this problem is driving me crazy!

Every now and again Google suddenly plunges my site down the rankings for keywords that it usually does quite well on. This can last for a week or so and then it suddenly jumps back up to the normal position. This keeps happening over and over again.

I have a search engine monitoring tool that I have taken a graph from. You can see that there are two levels that Google has for my site on this keyword and it's almost like someone is switching it on and off in the results.

This happens to all the keywords on my site that are competitive. The changes happen instantly i.e. one day I will be 7th in the rankings and the next day it will be on page 10 somewhere.

Has anyone seen this behavious before?

[edited by: tedster at 2:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2009]

[tedster]

Hello mammoo, and welcome to the forums.

Yes, this kind of thing has been discussed here a good bit. The main discussion (and it is quite long) is here: Yo-Yo Effect - Observations and Understandings [webmasterworld.com]

The general opinion seems to be that yo-yo rankings can happen when the backlink profile for the website is not diverse enough, not showing a natural balance between the many kinds of backlinks that a site can have.

[mammoo]

Thanks for the reply tedster. That does look similar to what I am experiencing but I do believe mine is slightly different. Mine is jumping from position 7/8 to about 100 overnight but then stays like that for a week or two. Then it will go back to normal for a few more weeks. I don't have many links to my site so I don't think it's because my links are changing in any way. Plus when it gets dropped it is my entire site that drops - not individual urls.

[tedster]

What you describe is exactly what I've seen as the yo-yo. The issue is not that your backlinks keep changing - the issue is that you do not have enough of them yet, from a wide enough variety of source, to stabilize your site in all of Google's behind-the-scenes data partitions.

If it helps you, you can think of your highest rankings as an occasional gift and the lower rankings as the ones that are more real. More backlinks from a healthy variety of sites should help your site stabilize at the higher rankings.

[mammoo]

Thanks tedster - I appreciate your help. Sounds like I need to create more back links then!

[topranker]

The exact same thing is happening to our site recently and it has over 200,000 backlinks, none paid, large variety of sites linking back, none or negligable reciprocal links.

The site is large uk (usually very high ranking) affiliate site with thousands of pages of unique content, no changes made to site apart from usual updates and creation of new pages.

Usual daily visitors 12,000
Oct 26th went down to 2,000
Nov 3rd went up to 14,000
Today looking like 2,000 again

Lee

[tedster]

There is one other observation that might play in, topranker. Have you recently had a large increase in backlinks to your site? - especially where the topic is NOT in a "fresh" or "hot" keyword area that is currently generating new buzz and search increases around the web as a whole?

[topranker]

Not that i'm aware of but i'll look into it and report back.

With the way the site works it gets constant but a steady rate of backlinks from a wide range of websites and anchor text to relevant internal pages, which reflects in the sites ability to rank pretty well for almost any keyword search term, so you would imagine it should be a pretty stable website.

One thing which appears odd is that we have had this problem around this time every year which causes us to mis the boost in sales over Christmas, probably just bad luck for it to happen three times in a row.

I can only assume there is an unlerlying problem in the type of links we receive, and as it's the users of our site who get links back to their own pages then perhaps that could be the problem.

Lee