I have a relatively new site (has no PR) which seems to be slowly creeping up the Google rankings. For the search term 'free stock images' it is now in 24th place, but 2 days ago it was on the 4th page, before that on the 5th page and before that it was nowhere to be seen, it seems to be slowly creeping upwards! The site is highly ranked for other mini searches (e.g. sad puppy graphics, circle circus etc etc.) but they just went staright into the top because not at all competitive. I was just wondering whether people think search terms jump hugely up Google because of certain inbound links or any SEO or if they just slowly creep up over time. Given the fact that I did a load of link exchanges and got quite a lots of inbounds in a few days I reckon they creep up slowly over time? Otherwise they would ahve just jumped, right?
Read threads around to get a rough idea. Google dance is going on it seems. Many people are noticing such changes. May be it will be still in some days. Also google SERPS is independent of page rank and changes quite often and ur site's rank depends upon more than 200 factors.
google is very weird at the moment. I just noticed the weirdest set of serps for a key-word I rank for. A totally new domain (with NO content yet) made it into the top 5 and beyond the top 10 the results were of the old Altavista-quality. I was at 3 and 4, so I'm not very upset, but this is not at google's usual standards. So if there is a google-dance going on - don't mind it. Things will change and get to a slower pace of change. Anyhow, changes in the amount of links to your domain don't add up to serp-changes until they are crawled. So it could be months untill you see a definite change for the better (that's reasonably stable).
They can do both really. Each targeted term will be different because – as U eluded to – of the competitive nature of the term. Movement varies there is no ‘rule of thumb’ As for data pushes ( Google Dance is NOT a SERPs change people) many people around here miss some fundamental statistical reasoning. If there was a data push in progress more than 15 or so people would be talking. Out of the 1000s of people at DP everyday, what do you think the odds are that 15 had SERPs movement? Very Good really… on any given day. SERPs are constantly shifting. A Matt stated, there is not going to be much in the way of DPs etc… during the Xmas season as last year people were crying bloody murder…. We many a variety of projects across multiple markets with varied ages and sizes of sites… there is no data push underway :0)
I'll have to agree with thegypsy there (webmasterworld was a scary site during Jagger ) but just to get back on topic, the SERPs of a site can jump, crawl and flux! (posh name for going one step back 3 steps forward ) Depends on the search term your after and your competition
Thats cool to know. It gives me something to watch when im bored editing the site! Thansk guys for the replys.