Ranking Jumps after force crawl through WMT followed by drops

[jarretbarber]

Hi Guys,
Just would like some advice on this one. I have at least 3 sites doing this. After having some ranking jumps naturally they are dropping 5-10 spots on average for their main keywords without any reason.

I then go into WMT - force crawl and get the page re-indexed which instantly restores them to the position they were before the drop.

Then a day or so later they have dropped again.

I have repeated this process multiple times and the same thing happens every single time

has anyone else seen this or know why this happens?

Thanks!
Jarret

[aakk9999]

Hi jarretbarber and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I am presuming that when you mention "force crawl" , you are doing "Fetch as Googlebot" and then resubmitting to index?

I can only speculate that forcing re-crawl of the page resets some signals in Google that are then folded in a day or so later.

You say this is happening with 3 sites. Is it home page you are talking about or internal page? Are you observing it with only one keyword or with a number of keywords? In between the recrawls, are you changing the content of the page at all?

Have you tried saving Google cache of the page that appears immediately after the recrawl (when your page jumps up) and compare it with Google cache of the page when the page drops down after a day or so?