Google Rankings Shifting Hourly, for Days...?

Anyone else seeing this, and I mean on sites where for months (or even years) you've had solid rankings on page 1?

In the past few weeks, on multiple sites of my own and several guys I work with/for we are seeing some kind of odd "rotation" in what used to be consistent rankings.

Rotation meaning that it seems one day, for a given keyword, a certain group of sites will rank on page 1, the next day a different set, and so on, and then it starts over again. This has been happening for at least a month or more.

And I am talking about several sites that are or have been very well entrenched, with high domain authority.

One day it's #3 page one, next day on page 33. I've seen SERPs dance before, but this seems different.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Yea it happens from time to time, usually settles down within a couple of weeks or sometimes within 3-4 days.

I currently check a large number of keywords vs the 20 sites in the last serp check the system did vs a number of google datacenters for volatility and at times there are bigger spikes in the changes of serps across differnent categories. Last one I had was about a week ago and I attribute that to google dynamic search arriving in my local area (before it was mostly usa). Now the volitality has gone down and I see most of my sites at the same positions. Of course it could be something else - but such spikes in volatilty happen every now and then - the may update had the biggest one I have seen for a number of months.

Some of my pages have been doing just that for years. Sometimes making the same search seconds apart can see a difference. Find something more important to worry about, as this type of thing will drive you mad, Spend time thinking how your gonna make your site better than everyone elses.

Yeah - I suspected there could be some relationship to the roll out of Google Instant. But I also didn't want to assume that the instant/dynamic aspect necessarily meant a change in the algo in terms of SERPs.

Thanks Fiendix.

While I completely appreciate/agree with what you are saying, in my case, there's a little more to it than that.

Besides my "side projects" or even a small SEO consultant site that I own, I have a full time job and am responsible for the company's SEO. (Hint: Not referring to the site in my signature.)

Since our SERPs have begun to dance, the heat has been on me to turn things around. I've taken some steps such as validating on page code, acquiring some good authoritative backlinks, oversaw a blog push (i.e. fresh content) and I've masterminded what I think will be a highly effective "link bait" strategy.

That last one is the only one not executed yet, and I think it might be the most important/powerful one (time will tell.)

And actually, since it involves making a useful tool available for free to site visitors, it should succeed at making the site "...better than everyone elses..." within our niche and regional market. So I'm with you.

Point taken. Could it also be that whilst your making the changes to your site that you mention, this could also be the cause of your unsettled search results.

Actually im see'in my sites jump up and down just now again just like 2 weeks ago - not for all keywords, but quite a bit over for 10 different categories and over 20 sites and 100's of keywords (yea my robots basically scan google all the time ). Im in eastern europe btw. Morning they are fine and then late evening they are all over the place and the back where they were in the morning. Nothing like the may day update though as that was just huge and across the board and "permanent". Dont know maybe some sort of small cache update going on. Google is big you know and prolly takes a bit for some stuff to get through or could be some sort of hiccup - i really try not to worry unless the changes stick after a week or so.. (if they are bad of course ).

OY! stop it

http://forums.seochat.com/search.php?searchid=566564

Yes, I have similar kind of experience for Office Chairs keyword. My website felt too much SERPs dance during last month [On first page].

I also observed that, some time Google shows 12 web URLs with Google Shopping & Google Place result.

I am thinking that, Google want to update & try to give some new result during high search volume keywords & increase no. of selection in front of Google users.

I see that my pages with more traffic and user activity such as comments get the most keyword placement.

Comments will make a page more useful with external links and those links do count for SEO ranks.

Wow this thread lived on beyond my expectations. I've been so busy at work I didn't realize there was additional activity.

The only changes on the page and associated target keyword were fixing code errors to be more compliant with W3C standards (some errors originate with 3rd party Javascript tracking code, and simply won't validate ) AND acquiring some authoritative backlinks.

Those backlinks are from highly authoritative EDUs (think Ivy League) as well as some hand picked blogs that are very relevant to our sites's industry etc.

No change to on page content at all. The site has an integrated blog, and within that blog, we have generated and posted several fresh blog posts in the past few weeks, all completely original content, and thus I cannot imagine those causing any kind of penalty or filter affect...(?)

Interesting, yes I have been seeing more than 10 results in some cases on certain searches. For example, when I search the term "cancer" (which has nothing to do with my site and industry, just an example...) I see that Google.com/Health appears in the top position, but apparently doesn't "count" itself in the results, because 10 more results are listed below it:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=cancer&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS272US273&ie=UTF-8

For whatever reason, I have had a nagging hunch in the back of my mind that some day, Google would start experimenting with being more "democratic" in it's serving of results, such that we would begin to see a cycling through of various sites for certain keywords, purely to give all the main players an "equal split" of SERP time if you will - or, to put it from G's perspective, to give their users a wider selection of "relevant results" for their searches.

Maybe no such conspiracy is or ever will happen, but now that I am seeing a number of our sites dropping that had previously ranked well, it makes me wonder.

I also wonder about backlinking in general and whether we are seeing a crack down on unnatural looking (heavy keyword anchor text oriented) backlinks - the kind that SEO has sworn by as an industry for years, and which may now be more easily detectable and thus more filtered or penalized by Google for being suspicious and unnatural, etc.