"Google cant make up its mind" - Result Fluctuation

For the past 4 - 6 weeks I have been seeing huge variations in result for a keyword search term.

One day I am appearing 3rd then the next I am the 4th result on the second page. The result that appears 3rd is the homepage URL but when it appears on the second page it fluctuates between the homepage and a sub page which is the page I have actually optimised for this term.

I know results can vary depending on which data centre serves the results, but surely this is too large a difference for too long a time now!? It looks like Google just cant make up its mind!

Does anyone have any suggestions what is going on here and what I can do to ensure I am listed more frequently in the 3rd spot?

The search term is "lost car keys". The result that appears 3rd is http://www.theautolocksmith.co.uk. If not listed on the 1st page it varies between this URL and http://www.theautolocksmith.co.uk/lost-car-keys.html.

Your faced with the same scenario as me. The answer as always is Links. One way links, the better the quality the better for you. The advice is the easy bit. Getting them is another thing entirely.

I am seeing the same flucuations on a keyword. The one thing all the sites fluctuating have in commen is the amount of inbound links. We all have similar links from similar places and noone has significantly better links than the rest so google rotates us giving us all a fair share of the traffic. Every now and again it throws a rogue site in amongst us, I cant quite figure out why that is happening though.

Whats difficult for me is my site is in a field without lots of available links and those avaialble are sourced by everyone. Im working on it though.

I am guessing here... but willing to bet a month's pay that I am correct...

Google is experimenting with searcher response to your page. They display your page higher than it deserves based upon links and traditional ranking criteria. Then Google watches to see if searchers click your page in the SERPs - and stay on your page.

If they feel that your page provides good experience to searchers it will be promoted in ranking.

This is not a "problem"... it is opportunity.

I see the potential for huge problems and abuse. People paying others to search for terms they desire to have good rankings for and staying on the page. Not disagreeing with you, I just see this as opening a whole new window for rankings manipulation.

I agree. It's like a radio station introducing a new song to see if listeners like it. If only the most popular sites get on page one, then everyone else has a very hard time getting "air time", unless you buy links (payola). If the response is low, back you go!

I also believe Google intentionally throws in a degree of randomness and delayed response to site changes in order to mix up the results as an attempt to prevent reverse engineering of their algorithm.

Ed

I would think you would need a very large, geographically dispersed group of paid searchers to pull that off. My guess is that Goggle can detect un-natural search activity, just as they can detect un-natural linking patterns.

Ed

This does seem like a possible explanation. I'm now very concerned because I frequently type the search term "lost car keys" into Google to check for my listings. I never actually click on to my site and stay there though. So could my constant (maybe slightly obsessive searching) be having a negative effect on my own site?

Yes but you have a new blog post and you have a network of friends in StumbleUpon or Digg or another SN. The post gets a lot of action, time on the site etc, easy to pull off a lot of different geographies hitting your site. Using a specific search term might be more difficult be in my mind easier to manipulate than getting high quality links. We have had a number of posts regarding user intent and some experiments but little proof of a cause and effect for permanently higher SERPs. Yes...it does appear they are really mixing up their results more too. Although I find sites with really strong authoritative backlinks still hardly have any significant swing in SERPs.

If Google uses backlinks, allinanchor, keyword density, title tags, H1 or other observable metrics it is easy for SEOs to observe and decide what drives rankings. The SEO also controls these things and can change and see what happens.

With visitor behavior Google can collect data on any type of action and we have no idea what they use as criteria or when they take the data or on which data center it is taken on.

For people to manipulate behavior data you would need a global network of "collaboration" who made actions at exactly the right time that Google was testing and on exactly the right data center. Unlikely that manipulation would get this right.

But the most convincing argument against manipulation are.... 1) to be successful the manipulation of behavior data would have to be carried out perpetually, and, 2) the efforts of that manipulation would need to increase as the traffic started to flood in as a result of higher ranks.

This could be more costly and harder to maintain than buying links for important commercial terms. Fooling Google on behavior will be very difficult.

If the engineers at Google are not using visitor behaviors they should have their heads examined.

This is not inconsistent as it is higly possible/probable that the authority sites user behavior data is also very strong.

I would think the QDF filter must allow new pages/sites a chance to rank or how else could it work. The new site/page/link boost effect I believe is associated with this filter also. Google is looking for topical and current relevance now. This is the way it hopes to stay ahead of the rest of the pack. Keywords change in meaning and importance over time. There was a good example in a post just before about "spore creatures" it is not now until page 3 of a search for spore do you get this "The spore is the basic reproductive unit of a fungus. It serves the same role in the fungal life-cycle that seeds do in the life-cycle of a plant. ..." Thus in web terms the term spore has now vastly changed it meaning. Google wants to be first to give these user behavior changes to a searcher.

Manipulation would likely be easy for a non competative term. But that is true now as a non competative term does not need much manipulation to win. Throw a few decent links at it. I would imagine that the user behavior data would have to be fairly strong to change anything.

I think there are now two things happening 'ranking' and 'ordering'. Links get you ranks but user behavior data can rearrange ordering of the last couple of pages.

As stated above the QDF filter must allow user behavior data to overide link juice or the filter could not give fresh conetent to a query.

Bottom line: Focus your SEO efforts and make your site relevant and sticky...