Experiencing a higher ranking volatility than usual

Started by IceFlok, 11-14-2017, 09:48:20

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IceFlokTopic starter

Hello guys.

Two months ago I changed my domain to HTTPS and in the last month a competitor joined the "war" for the number 1 position for a keyword that I have always been the first result.

Last month I noticed that I had lost the #1 rank and then started working again in this keyword (creating content, doing a lot of backlinks with the respective keyword) and something strange started to happen: everyday the ranks for my competitor and me changes. I wake in the morning at #1 and when I go to sleep I find myself at #3.
Even during the day the ranks are changed and sometimes I go down even further, sometimes hitting #5 in keywords that in the worst scenario I was the #2.

I've gained a lot of backlinks in the the last week and doing a lot of work but that seems not to work properly (here, "work properly" means I become the #1 and then stay there like forever).

Is something happening with Google these last days? There is a way to improve my ranks doing others actions than the ones I am used to?

If you need more information or something sounded a little bit confusing, feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance.
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damponting44

I'm positioning here and I'm fluctuating a cluster, goodness, however it turns really the positions around me are additionally fluctuating, prepare to have your mind blown. It's not you. It's the SERP. It's Google. Try not to point the finger at yourself for this.


IceFlokTopic starter

Quote from: damponting44 on 11-14-2017, 22:46:59
I'm positioning here and I'm fluctuating a cluster, goodness, however it turns really the positions around me are additionally fluctuating, prepare to have your mind blown. It's not you. It's the SERP. It's Google. Try not to point the finger at yourself for this.

Thanks for your answer, Dam.

Unfortunately, mostly of the time my competitor is always #1. He is just using some backlinks on sidebars and became the fist result.

I did a lot of keyword research, my links are directly on content (in another blogs and sites). I do not know what to do more. I cant let them be the #1.
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jeffjohnson

I am suffering through the volatility as well on my site. It seems to have started in the 1st week of November 2017.   One day I am #1--the next day #11 and so on.  I heard that Google did a new update--not as big as Panda or Penguin but enough to create the scenario we are in now.  As time has passed the dynamics of the volatility seemed to have waned.  My site is back to #4 status and I might even go higher.  I will have to wait to see if there are more problems because only time will tell.

Deepak1

Firstly lets correct a couple of things I spotted in your question.
Meta title is not the same as page title, altering the meta title will have no bearing on your ranking and infact meta title is ignored by all major search engines. Hopefully you mean page title and not meta title.
As for meta description, its true google often use that to display as the snippet in search but again its not used in helping you rank. Tweaking this will not gain you positions but can help in clicks if your description is better than your competitors.

Your link building should be avoided really and could be seen as trying to manipulating your position. Almost all reputable sites now add on rel="nofollow" to the links so that will not help you in the slightest from a ranking point of view. Your train of thought really when posting about your site is to gain traffic and not rankings. When a site is evaluated a healthy backlink profile should be mostly nofollow which shows to google your intentions are more in the marketing of your site and not trying to manipulate search results. Marketing your site is perfectly fine and something you really should do but building links to give you a boost is a dangerous game and can and often does hold you back or worse case have a negative effect.

The last 10 years has seen major changes in how google determine who is top, reputation is 1 of them. a bad backlink profile is often the root cause of why sites perform badly and if your experiencing bouncing as you suggest that would to me start setting off alarm bells as google cant quite make up its mind if your a honest trustworthy site or not.
However it is normal to see fluctuations in results when google are trying out new filters or algorithms, sometimes they put things back if they concider the results are not better for the user, other times they do a complete roll out, so its hard to say for sure that you will stabilize by not doing anything or not.
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