Hi, my site has been swinging pretty wildly in Google over the last couple of weeks and just trying to figure it out. It's gone from middle of page 5, to the top of page 3, now to the bottom of page 4. Anyone know what could cause this much swing?
google dance looks like. how old is the site? looks like your site is trying to come up higher in ranking but don't have a strong base. building some quality backlinks will help maintain its ranking. keep building quality backlinks will help it push higher
I'm guessing that you mean the rankings for a particular phrase has your site moving in the serps, right? If so, the best thing to do is wait - I know it's not easy to do, but until the algo settles down, you don't want to tamper with what might be working or hurting your site rankings.
Thanks for the replies, the site is only 7 months old and only got indexed in google a month or so ago so I'm guessing that has a lot to do with it. It's also all over the place in Yahoo as well, it's gone from top of page 2 to page 16, then page 9, then page 11, now at last look it's at page 8. The only one that seems to stay steady is msn and it stays at the top of page 2. The key phrase I'm talking about is free chat rooms. I guess I'll just keep working on building links and just wait and see where it shakes out.
Google's just trying to figure out where to best place your site in its index with regard to the keywords you are trying to rank well for. Also don't forget that the other sites are doing the same thing you are, so this kind of behavior is to be expected from time to time. In other words, it's normal (and not a "Google Dance" which was associated with major algorithm changes, not occurances like this).
One of my sites (3 months old) is doing the same. Sometimes at #4 for Google than drops to #36 for 2 key phrases. This seems to happen periodically over 24 hours, e.g. high for 4 hours in the evening then dropping back. This has been happening for about 4 weeks. Today i spent the whole day at #4 before dropping back down an hour ago. My feeling is that the last poster, Dan Schulz, is correct: Google is seeing if the site gets hits when posted at the higher position, i.e. testing whether it deserves the high position. The site still has PR0 and only shows high in 1 country - it's below page 10 in any other.
for new websites it generally happen, so try to make some quality backlinks and keep on adding fresh and unique content to your website.
You might get a more stable ranking or a better one with building quality links but you must also do on-page optimization concurrently coz the 'dance' has something to do with the competition.
You need to continue building backlink for your site from time to time, in other to maintain your rank and position on Google.
This is just Google combating all the different manipulation techniques people keep using for getting ranked in search results. My personal opinion is backlinks are being devalued more and more, probably the reason for sites losing rankings that have been consitant and the random changes in search results. I believe actual content and on-page factors will play a great role in future search engine algorithms. You can thank all the paid text link buyers, huge link exchange networks, etc for this possible theorized course of action by Google.
Maybe google blacklisted/whitelisted any of your mass external incoming links. The right webmaster should have incoming links naturally, and I honestly don't think yours was natural for some reason (at least in Google's eyes and not mine). @wisdom tool thats pretty weird.. Are you sure that what you had (backlinks) are trustworthy in terms of natural backlinks? (example of nontrustworthy backlinks can be these links in our signature from Dp, why? Cause Google told one thing pretty straight, make a site for the people not the engines and most backlinks from seo forums are for engines.)
My sites are directly related to search engine optimization so in theory backlinks from an SEO forum would be relevant.
It is about the relevancy. No one is granted its place in the Search engines. SE have to dispaly relevant results. Taht means different results which depend on geographic area, search terms and etc.
Google already focuses on the content that's on each page. Check your backlinks from time to time (every three months or so). You'll probably notice that some have been no-followed since then or removed entirely.