Anyone else seeing major ranking fluctuations in Google?

I've been seeing a huge fluctuation in rankings in Google for a specific phrase over the past week. Datacenter checks show the site no lower than 4, manual searches (today) have it on page 9. I manually check the phrases daily and have been seeing it hop from around #2 to pages 7 to 9 about every other day.

Anyone else seeing activity like this?

 

Google is screwed at present!

 

So that's a yes.

 

yes

Many of my serps are jumping around a little. A bit unnerving but hopefully it iwll settle down.

Im still position 1 on Yahoo for 4 out of 6 sites at least Yahoo is stable.
Sadly it gives me no traffic

This is weird, but if I have my local google open and both IE and Firefox open, the firefox search results are always slightly different...

and they PREDICT what my internet explorer results will show about 12 hours later!

its weird...try it. I know different DCs give different results. but this is same location and same time etc.

Weird

 

That is odd. Are you sure it's not a cache issue? I just don't know why browsers would show different results for the same data center.

I've been seeing this jumping around for a little while, I said conservatively a week, but it seems like a 2008 thing.

It also only seems to be certain sites, possibly sites recently launched. I'm seeing a lot of movement on 3 sites launched the passed 2 months, while my older sites are generally stable - the lone exception being a site that I 301'd to a different domain, which has now dropped off the charts (I was expecting a drop because of the redirect, I hope to god it bounces back).

How old are the sites you're seeing this kind of movement on?

 

I don't know but I think there is no ranking fluctuations in competitive keywords (in my niche).

 

I'm seeing some major movement - but here is something I thought was odd?

i have a site and a blogger blog that are in the same niche - useually in google they have been showing up on the same page for months, useually just a couple places apart for a big variety of the keywords I track. Useually my site out ranks my blog

I guess because of backlinks and age?

(there is no duplicate content - but similair content - both have same products - but different descriptions, pictures if available etc)

my site has droped linke crazy in the serps

my blog has actually went UP!!!!!!!

This has happened in the last 2 weeks or so? I'm just kind of waiting it out before I make changes or up dates to either

 

It this happens to your site it means only one thing, your site is not yet well optimized and still need a lot of link building and promotion!

 

Interesting.

Other folks seeing movement, do you have multiple sites in the same niche? That's where I'm seeing the jumping around. Niches where I have one site I'm not seeing movement.

 

No, it's something else. A site not well optimized and up against much stronger sites won't reach #1. I'm seeing bounces from #1 to page 9. That back-and-forth fluctuation is not normal. Granted, a stronger site would hold it's position higher in the SERPs, but a weak site would stay towards the lower pages. The jumping isn't normal.

 

I did not noticed any major fluctuation in google. My site ranking is still the same.

 

One of our sites that was well ranked (top ten) for multiple keywords/phrases. (Site is < 6mos old). Last week (Wednesday) it dropped (100 places) in the serps for several of our main targeted phrases but only 4 or 10 spots for others. Competition remained unchanged, due to domain age and unchanged static content << speculation

Since this site is a WP blog we decided to test and see if some sort of ceiling (limit) was in place to prevent new content from indexing well (on Google) during this condition. We did a new post with very non-competitive keywords. From past experience this new post should have indexed quickly and in the top 5 with no problem. However, it did not attain top 5 results and remained positioned at the halfway mark (25 out of 50 pages on a non-specific search). Social bookmarking the site did not improve the situation and in fact the social bookmarks appeared higher in the serps than our original post. Conclusion is, when this anomaly occurs any long tail strategy is also going to be effected moving forward... not good. Some regulation applied to the domain may be in place... but who knows.

Two days later (last Friday) the site was back to it's original position in the serps!

As of two days ago (Tuesday evening) the site is back down 100 places for many phrases and just a few for others. (none of our target keywords/phrases are in real competitive areas the toughest being 160K pages).

Something is up at Google, but what, will remain a mystery for quite awhile I imagine. In the mean time, remember who you're up against here (many many very smart people working very hard to make their system as hard as possible to game) Trying to game/beat their system will eventually, always I dare say, result in disappointment and frustration. Focus on doing the right thing and keep up to date with Big G's guidelines. If your sh*t is worth looking at, chances are it will show up and stay put. (IMHO)

How's that for taking the fun out of it

 

Search Engine Update Monitor shows 9% of sites gone from top 10 of Google (a little more than usual) on Jan 23, so it can be treated as algorithm update.

 

Thanks for the information. I can't wait to see how the sites being affected by this appear when this washes out. I think age has something to do with it, but that's my speculation.

 

Not a very impressive tool. Especially if you look at the archives of the previous months. 2008-01 Top ten change falls within the noise of the usual. As far as an algorithm change I would assume that was a given. What that change weighted, un-weighted, added or eliminated as relevant and how best to proceed from here is the question.

 

My older sites were not affected negatively. One old site moved up about 10 spots for a competitive phrase to #7 (no recent links or added content for about 3 months). Another older site jumped to the first page from no-mans land for a very competitive phrase (one update last 4 months).

I think this is an adding more weight to age=trust. But we'll see. If new sites stop bouncing around and settle at the top then the theory is wrong.

 

Google updates are hard to detect because Google constantly updates its index. Yahoo and MSN updates detected better. About investigating details of algo change: this is almost impossible because there are so many factors having influence on results. And I think the major factors are the off-site factors which we can't measure as Google can.

 

Interesting and inline with my observations! The latest going around (prior to this update) has been, Google may be placing more weight on new/fresh content. I think they do, but I think a good analogy might be (new content is like a glider... Google tows it up but it will only continue to fly if there is thermal activity in the area). In this case, thermals being searches for, clicks on and time spent on the newly indexed content. Thoughts?

I also found this interesting bit. Doing a general search of one of our previously indexed (#1-2) phrases results in no returns in the first 700 after this update. However, if you do a specific search the same phrase it will appear in the #2 spot. Go figure that one...

 

thank you for those that replied to my situation above

listen to this

My site I mentioned before the "maybe update" I was getting around 80 to 100 hits a day.
All of a sudden my site does not have the previous rankings that it did before - but my blog is still doing well.

Today I just check my stats on my site - I have had over 250 UV visitors today all from google. So yesterday my site was almost unmentionable in the serps today it have boomeranged and has more traffic than ever before?

Maybe it is just out site factors? My site and site visitors are directly affected by the economy - namely intrest rated (which just dropped 3/4 of a point yesterday?)

I'm not complaining - but I would like to know what happened?