Is anyone seeing excessive ranking fluctuations?
-
Has anyone noticed an unusual shift in ranking fluctuations starting around 20 hours ago?
I have noticed some fairly major positive shifts on two different websites, interested if anyone else has seen the same thing.
-
If there are excessive ranking fluctuations, often this is because of a Googe core algorithm update.
We recommend waiting a few weeks to see where your website ranks after the update has finished rolling out.
It happened for the Bristol Summerhouse business which we own; it moved to page 2 and then back to page 1 without us needing to improve the company's organic SEO.
-
SEMrush Position tracking is showing a lot of false flux lately for a couple of reasons.
1) They don't identify your position in the SERPs and report it as "not in top 100". If you click to see the cache that they used to obtain the rankings your domain is there.
2) Google has been inserting and removing a link to the image results at the top of many SERPs. "Images for [your query]" When present, SEMrush is counting this link to the image results as position #1 and the result is all results below are pushed down one position. When not present, all of the results below move up one position. You don't notice this very much in your visibility score if you are on the second page. However, if you have keywords that rank in the top three or four it can make a huge change in your visibility score.
3) Google does seem to be experimenting a bit and even losing track of a few pages for the keywords that they typically rank for. So, yes there is a little more flux in Google, but the number changes in many of the tools are a result of contaminated data and bad data collection.
-
We have seen fluctuations in our 4 sites, we consider it seasonal as it happens every year around the holidays and picks back up in mid January
KJr
-
I have in the past week or so seen huge fluctuations. I've checked various algorithm sensors (SEMrush, Mozcast) etc. and for the industry we deal in there has been significant movement since around 12th January 2018.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why am i ranking better in canada?
hi, some of my keywords with high volume are ranking on first page in canada, but in the states i am on 3rd pages first result. what factors are contributing this disparity. what can be done here in this case. is it because of my links and tld distribution or some server location thing. what should i do to rank better in the US? i have shared hosting server in singapore.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Competitve keyword ranks on mobile but not on laptop
When i search for a very competitve keyword on a smart phone , my site ranks #6 but on laptop or desktop ranks #24. I do not have a mobile verison of my site just to clarify it. I have cleared the cache on my mobile and laptop. still the same. What is the reason for this?, I d appreciate an insight on this thanks. Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orion680 -
Home page mysteriously not ranking at all
Hey everyone, I'm baffled by a situation. I started working on www.hushabyephotography.com almost 3 months ago. The first thing I did was changed the address (was previously blog.hushabyephotography.com) and updated all of the links pointing from the old name to the new "www" and used 301 redirects for canonicalization. Have also built some additional links, added content to the site, and performed on-page optimization to rank for the primary key phrase "san diego newborn photography". But ranking is no where to be found, I searched for the key phrase, and at rank 190 is a random subpage, not even the home page. The listing had also disappeared from Google Places a few weeks ago after the client updated their listing (which I believe was the result of the known Places bug (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap). I'm at a loss here for ideas, as I've never failed to at least have a site on the radar. There aren't any spam links so I don't think any penalties are the result. One last thing, it ranks on page 2 in both Bing and Yahoo... Please help me out Mozzers!!! 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
How do we get individual products to rank ?
Hi, We have a site that sells music and we have been researching SEO and things we can do to help SERPs. We have started on link building and have added links to the footer of our page We have friendly urls, meta tag description added to all products. My question is, Yes we can work on getting keywords to rank better in google, one of ours being buy cds. But when it comes to individual products these keywords and results are useless if people are searching for a CD by artist or title which most do as they know what they are looking for. How do i get better results for all these unique products ? One or more of our competitors constantly show up in first few results for nearly any CD search by artist or title, yet we cant seem to get anywhere near this type of result ? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PressPlayMusic0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Design features as a ranking factor?
i created a new design of my website, very clean and highly orientated towards conversion. its a far better looking site than the old one but the navigation is almost the same. a few days after i uploaded the new site we were ranked number 1 on the biggest keyphrase in my industry. Does google crawl design feature, maybe with something like conversion heat mapping software and include that as a ranking factor? love your thoughts on this one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corgi2 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0