Hey guys I have been tracking my site for a few keywords and what is weird is I will rank as #5 for a specific keyword and if I refresh the page I will move down to #10 for example. This is occurring for 5 of my keywords and is literally consistent and happens on a daily basis. If I goto another site, go back to google and search it will do the same thing. This has also been going on for about 2 weeks now. Any ideas why this is happening?
Hi yes i've noticed this happening quite a few times over the years; and it seems to happen quite close to algo and PR updates. It only seems to affect a percentage of the sites that I manage, so its a bit of a strange one really!
Which result tends to be correct? The first one or the one that is refreshed? Does it mean it is borderline trying to calculate my site and based on which algo it is going to use it will be placed in that current position?
Google sometimes tests different indexes. They put up the main index on 95% their servers and the test index on 5% of them. So you'll get dancing results if you happen to hit a test server. Or if they're rolling out a new index you'll see different results because it takes some time to deploy a new index across the estimated 1 million servers they have in place now. If you're really serious about it you can get a list of "Google Data center IPs" and check your rank on each one. There are even a few tools out there that will check a bunch of them at once for you.