Many of us have seen fluctuation in search engine result page (SERP) or site’s ranking on Google Search Results (SR’S) fluctuate and you know why? Recently, one of our client has asked me the same question and I thought it would be beneficial to post an answer for everyone.
I have personally seen Google search results fluctuations since I started my SEO career from 2006 to till date. For one thing, if it wasn’t for Google changing the search results pages, none of our clients would have had top of Google rankings, right?
But what I mean here is gaining and losing first page or top 3 positions in cycles. Normally, this doesn’t happen for very competitive keywords; as explained by matt cutts. As top players always have SEO Experts on their sides, but for less competitive keywords, this is a common phenomenon.
Here are some common reasons for Fluctuation in search engine result that you see on Google:
- Posting fresh content: Google values fresh content on sites. Adding a new story to your blog, posting a new article on your site or simply rewriting your site’s homepage could trigger Google bots to move you up the scales a few notch. Same could go for your competitors. However, the improvements in rankings don’t last that often unless you keep on updating your site’s content.
- Optimization Removal: if our SEO team has optimized your site and you have over-written the optimization work by uploading your old files to the server, you have caused your site’s rankings to be dropped. In this case, you can ask our team to re-upload the files.
- Different Google bots: each Google bot (spider) uses a slightly different algorithm; so, theoretically, when different spiders visit your site, they would rank your site according to their algorithm.
- Duplicate content: this is also more likely a theory as I have not seen the proof of it, but I was just reading Google Webmaster Help and someone had claimed if your site’s content is copied by someone else, it could fluctuate your rankings. However, what I’ve seen with duplicate content is that rankings will drop to 10+ pages of Google SR’s.
