Admittedly kind of new at the seo thing as a whole. We have several websites trying to gain ranking on keywords, the websites range from 4months – 12months old so sandbox can defiantly be in the equation. All websites have many external links etc. etc. However we notice many of the websites jump into the rankings in the 250-350 range for one day, then the next day they are just completely gone altogether. They will then reappear a week later and do the same thing. At first we were attributing this to sandbox so we kept building, building and patiently waiting to no avail. Then we figured maybe it was some case of duplicate content, so we redid almost every webpage of every website to ensure this was not the case (this alone took over a month), waited to no avail again. It has not corrected the problem on any of the domains. Anyone else witness this phenomenon? Or care to shed some light on what could be causing this? The websites are not dropping out of the index, if you search for the website itself it will show up with no problem. Also the websites surely do not have the capability to gain top 20 or 30 (yet), we are actively searching and trying to attain quality links, but shouldn’t our rankings on the keywords at least be stable? Even if it is in the 300+ range? Or even listed for the keyword search at all? Also as a side note our target keywords only have 750-850 matching results, so we have ruled out ranking fluxes past the 1000 searchable range. Any info would be much appreciated, thanks much.
Is this in just google or all the other search engines? Do you get any search engine referals for any keywords, even those you are not targetting? What is the site name? .. it will make it easier to analyze Is it cached in Yahoo, google or MSN??
Age of the site could certainly be causing you some problems, but google is constantly tweaking its alogrithm and wild flucuations are common - especially for competitive keywords. I have 8 year old sites that usually rank in the top #5 for some highly competitive keywords but every once in a while they drop out of the top 1000 (with no changes whatsoever to the site) - only to return in a few days. You always want to see improvement, but if you aren't in the top 20 you aren't likely to be losing any significant traffic. You might want to target some less competitive keywords for now. Low quality of backlinks can also cause more unstable SERPS.
I have a theory on this, As google has lots of different datacentres that cache pages at different rates not all of the datacentres are factoring all of your pages or links from other websites. Especially if you've recently built lots of links, then the chances are they haven't been cached in all of Googles datacentes. This would mean your ranking would depend on which datacentre you were querying for the results at any one time and which pages/links that datacentre had already taken into account. I've noticed with almost all sites that especilly in the early days rankings can fluctuate wildly, and I've seen this again after a big batch of link building.
It is just google. Infact all of the traffic for search comes from yahoo & msn... some from netzero search. And the majority from our paid adverts on directories for our category (this is essentially what we are trying to create). We have went through the effort of offering “free†websites to every client we have, to try and build our own network of sites. Unfortunately the website is not appropriate to post in these forums, but also should mention is NOT X rated. I would however be perfectly willing to talk in a more private format about specifics and compensate you for your time and expertise. The breakdown is as follows. We have about 10 websites (all different clients) – these clients come and go (this is what creates the difference in domain age). We have 2 main “target†websites trying to get ranking on keywords of keywords (our city), keyword (our state). For many, but not all of the client websites we DID use a generic template, but the text is different. What we then did was cross link all the websites (many are on different class C ip’s). The more and more we look at it, the more we think we may be getting hit with a “duplicate content†filter from google. I should also mention our particular niche is VERY difficult to get links, never mind quality links. We pay very dearly for advertising on the popular sites, but this does not count for pagerank because the websites use a link redirect. But of course we try and get all the links we possibly can for every website. Again, a private conversation would be very much appreciated if willing. We are willing to try anything and do ANY amount of work necessary. Our target keywords are dominated by pretty much spammers (but stable ones), and not very smart ones at that. They create hundreds of domains and cross link them with virtually the same homepage, it is honestly an 8th wonder how they don’t get snagged by some filter. Of course this always fuels the frustration. Hope to chat soon. Again if anyone that has much experience in this field is willing to be a consultant please contact for a private conversation. I don’t have much for upfront cash but do realize your time and knowledge is worth money.
The 12 month old site should really be more stable, especially in google. Check if your site is chached properly in google and check that it has PR. Basically just make sure that your site can be crawled properly.
All sites are being crawled properly, and google is indexing all the pages we want, reading the sitemaps properly etc. The older sites have PR some of the newer ones don’t. Most importantly our target sites do have both, but this is still occurring. Most interesting the ONLY website is it not occurring on is a website that has only a flash intro and an enter button + essentially a title tag. Weird stuff really.
the Intermittent rankings were caused by different data centers having different data. When I query the different datacenters, some were listing the sites some were not. Some of the websites are 9+ months old... weird.... Google seems to be really slow on some data centers i guess.