A lot of people wonder why their ranking can go from being on the top five in search engine results only to drop sharply the next day. Slight fluctuation can easily be understood but there might be a deeper reason as to why your ranking may fluctuate so drastically. It is important to realize that Google and other search engines make use of a variety of algorithms, filters, and other barriers that are effective in producing relevant results. So if you are wondering why your site is not ranking anymore, here are some common reasons:
- The Page is Too Well Aligned ? it is possible that you become too aggressive in targeting the same phase in your anchor text, page title, meta description, and page headings that search engines simply filter out these phrases.
- Scraping ? if you own a new website with a limited number of trusted link, a scraper site can get credit for the contents on your site. Make sure you have absolute links in your navigation and you must build more authoritative links to make it more difficult for scrapers to lower your ranking.
- Problems with Page Rank ? if your PR is spread across a lot of pages with duplicate content, some of the good content might be placed in the supplemental results and this will not rank well. Meanwhile, your remaining pages may rank worse than before because it no longer has as much equity link as before.
- Community ? if you are a new player in the market, it would help your site to get some community links. Google can re-rank results based on your community link.
- Too many reciprocal links ? reciprocal links are not bad in itself but if too many of your links are actually reciprocated then you can get hit. Remember not to get too many reciprocal links when your site is only starting out as well.
7 Comments
Add your commentYou have written some good reasons about Google rankings fluctuation. Google ranking system is getting more complicated nowadays. I noticed that sites rankings are fluctuated almost every week. It seems that they also drop quality blogs for no reason.
Hard to understand how they rank sites. These days Internet and home based business shouldn’t rely on Google as the main source of getting potential customers because the risk of losing rankings are high.
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Too many reciprocal links are indeed a risk to ones stable PR . I wonder why would people keep on reciprocating links in excess like 100s of links and these are not going to help the cause . Instead it is better to build only few of those that have higher quality and relevance .
Some good points you have made in this post :)
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And don’t forget The Google Dance – whenever I track keyword rankings of my site, I can almost always guarantee they’ll show high for a few days, then disappear for a few weeks, and then return stabilized to the top ten.
Most frustrating that is.
Enjoy,
Barbara
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Speaking of rankings fluctuating.. i just lost a 500 visitor a day keyword that I have had for months. Page just disappeared. not too happy. Might have been a dupe content issue, but not sure. Hopefully it will return.
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Can you elaborate more about community link, and how to go about getting them?
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Realy, You have written some good points for the Google rankings fluctuation. Thanks for that.
One problem is here, sometimes i have some keyword ranking in top 10 on Google, But next few days it will not show in 100. What\’s the problem? I also do some work regularly for the website. But problem is same.
Can you give me any suggestion about the stability of keyword ranking in Google.
What algorithm is used by Google for that?
I will appreciate if you give me you precious reply.
Thanks
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I’m working on some SEO for a site and sometimes it’s on the first 5 results for a keyword, and other times it’s on the 2nd page and a while later it’s back on the first page again without changing anything?? Weird…. any suggestions?
greetz
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