Anyone else notice this about Google ranking increases

I am just wondering about this as I send my keword rankings off to my customers. I have one customer in particular who is an SEO dream : clever and enthusiastic and treats his website like a labour of love (and he's a nice bloke too).

Anyway whenever we see a rise in his rankings it seems to come after a fairly flat period (or possibly a slow drift)...then we seem to get the champagne week for the rankings and the traffic goes up accordingly. The next time we check the rankings they've generally slipped back a noticable amount (although nowhere near as far their previous levels) and they sort of undulate until the next big rise. Does anyone else see this pattern?

Am I just noticing the different Google servers not all being slightly out of step...that's my pet theory to this thing.

There is no point to this I am just doing some musing really with a view to getting a better handle on ranking response times...actually reading back this post is rather pointless. Ah well, I've typed it now.

too much time on your hands maybe

It's most probable that you're just seeing "everflux" (Googles permanent "dance") or different DC's each time you search.

When you get more backlinks/link juice and consolidate a higher position, the fluctuation should diminish.

>>too much time on your hands maybe

I wish.

It's an interesting one but I think it's not worth going nuts over. It's just bizarre when you get from nowhere to second page back to nowhere then onto the second page again then finally getting to page one. The one thing it teaches you is don't immediately email your customer as soon as you see a ranking come on-stream.

lol - yep, it's always good to wait a while

If you're fluctuating between pages 1 & 2 (and "the void") you're not too far off getting a solid ranking in the top 10... just a few more quality links should clinch it ;)

It's a newish domain I'm working on so it's rankings seem a lot more shaky then with the older ones I work with.

I have one site which I built around January this year, so it is a pretty new site. I start writing content, so heavy on the month of February and it starts earning links.

At first the rankings were so shaky as what you have experience now, typically this happens around March to April 2008.

At last starting May, it finally reaches top position, the traffic is high but update is continual on the site. It still earns links, for 3 months until now, the ranking were stable.