Yo Yo effect... still looking for reasons

[Gizbo]

I’ve been reading some old threads going through this forum such as this one:
[webmasterworld.com...]
And I have to say that after reading them I still can’t say that I have an answer to some very disturbing problems I’ve been having with one of my sites.
For those of you who are not familiar with the expression – ‘The Yo Yo Effect’ it means: Having a web page going up and down and up and down again in an endless loop with big differences, in Google’s search results in a matter of days.
I have experienced this problem for quite some time now and am trying to figure out what could be the reason for this.
Here are some of the answers I’ve been finding on this forum or generally on the web following with my remaining questions that are left unanswered. I hope that this will bring up a discussion that will be able to bring us all closer to a logical conclusion on this matter. I’d appreciate any opinion or insight you may have:

1.The site is relatively new and has too many incoming links in a short period of time
•How much are too many links?
•What is a short period of time? My site’s avg link building is about 20-25
a month, all manually and all relevant by content. Is this considered too
much?
•I assume that a new site is less than a year old, but as far as I can see
in threads and posts on the web there are sites experiencing this problem
that are older than that.

2.Site get high rankings for a little while and this result’s to a low bounce rate and avg time spent on site which results to the rankings dropping down.
•There’s no way for google to know how much time a user spent on site. How
could it be a factor?
•Not all sites have Google analytics – isn’t It unbalanced to judge does
who have GA on parameters that cannot be tested on all competitor’s site?

3.Google’s filters for spam sites are crashing with each other
•The tread talks about google considering directories links as high value
links and then changing their mind. This might be relevant for long term
changes, but the Yo Yo effects talks about changes that take place in a
short time period. I don’t see the relevancy in this case.

[kshenkman]

Gizbo-

I have been experiencing something very similar lately. I have been working hard to get my site moved up for one keyword and got it from page 14 to page 1 (#8)- but after a day, it was gone all together. It popped in an out for about a week and then disappeared altogether for that keyword. As of today its showing up at # 10 on page 1! I thought it might be the caffeine update, but it's not page 1 at the google IP people are saying has been updated. Oh yeah, all through this process I have been #2 for a related keyword phrase, so it's not a sitewide thing.

I'm not sure any of the issues you mentioned apply to me, as the site is almost 10 years old, has better than average results for bounce rates, etc (as reported by Google Analytics) and has been slowly link building for years!

Looking forward to anyone's thoughts!

Ken

[Gizbo]

Hi Ken,

It sounds very similar to what I've been experiencing.
I am getting very good rankings for other words and other pages but for one specific word the ranking keeps changing.
If you're saying that your site is 8 years old and that you have been slowly building your incoming links it contradicts some of the theories I've been readying since I started learning about this.
I hope we'll get some talking here that can shed some light on the subject.