Website keeps jumping between 4th & 17-19th spot

[DiscoStu]

I have a website let's call it BlueRunningShoes.com. I keep consistently jumping between 4th spot on the front page and to the bottom of the 2nd page for the term "running shoes" (specifically it's between 17-19th place). After a jump, the site will remain in that position for 2-3 weeks typically, and then jump back again. Has been like that for a while now. I know in the past when I've seen this behavior it's been an issue of overoptimization (but then the jumps were much more extreme).

I tried getting some new links for that term to see if it would make the site "stick" on the first page, but no luck. Does anyone have any idea what the issue could be?

[tedster]

I started seeing this kind of behavior a few years back, but only in a very limited way. And it quite often involved position #4, too.

It seemed to me the best way to understand it was that the page 1 ranking was the "gift" - a sort of try-out. In one case that I followed for quite a while, the yo-yo continued for about 5 months, and then stabilized with a #7 ranking - not #4 where it had been blinking on and off.

The reason those first page rankings weren't sticking, I think, was because the backlink profile didn't have a natural and true variety - they were mostly links that looked clearly "arranged" in some way, and had a lot of matchy-matchy anchor text.

The answer, in that case at least, was to vary the way they acquired backlinks. They learned some new approaches and let those sites link however they want to. There's not a lot of discussion or agreed on knowledge in this area, I will say. So this is just my best guess.