Page 2 - Major Fluctuations. New update?

Just an observation on what I'm reading on other forums and what people are posting and on what I'm seeing - I 'think' (purely personal opinion here) - that these erratic behaviours, poor search results and indexing anomolies seem more like database problems than any algo tweak gone wrong.

Shoot me when you feel like it

I reckon something is happening on G.co.uk - for the industry i watch like a hawk i am seeing 3/4 sites in position 13/14/15 rotate to position 5/6, everytime/couple of times i refresh my search. These three different sites seem to be all taking it turn and i guess it's G experimenting and seeing how users interact with the site - i only wish mine was included becuase i'm so close to the top ten now!!

For what it's worth - I monitor, give or take about 220 websites and SERPS - some have been very erratic - on page one one week (or a few days) and no where to be found the next. I have seen overall improvement (that may coincide with new content, links, etc.).

I would tend to believe "something" is up, but would not committ to saying it's a, b, or c.

I am happy at any rate that things are not as solidly static as they were in that at least I have a chance to improve the serps.

I'm going to stick my neck out a bit here, but I am pretty sure something unusual is happening.

I monitor a very competitive UK one word generic search term (because one of my sites ranks well for it) on www.google.co.uk. This is a very lucrative term financially and has plenty of PPC activity on it.

For the past year this term has seen great stability with very few sites breaking into the top 10, and the top 5 or 6 being very very stable.

For the past 3 weeks there have been multiple changes to the SERPS with many new sites periodically popping in and out (mainly position 5). The top 3 are pretty stable, but they are swapping around within the 3 positions every few days.

Positions 4 to 10 are all over the place and changing very frequently.

Now this is a much more unusual situation than I have ever seen, something i think is happening out of the ordinary.

Reading through this thread and seeing what Channel5 just said and what others have about very long term stable SERPS going all over could definately be an indication of Database problems. maybe Google is again running out of space/bandwidth or their DB architecture is breaking down?

I think - again supposition - it may have something to do with the geo location of sites. To me .com's were always the preferred domain even for UK sites - G has specified the want for webmasters to use country specific domains. The way I think about it - the web has expanded hugley with many sites competing on .com domains - what better way to make searches more relevant and give more sites the chance to compete than to target geo locations depending on a searchers country.

To me that seems like quite a significant database reshuffle and modification - even Google aren't going to manage that without a few teething problems. Again, I don't think this is an update more of a restructure - or destructure depending upon what's happening to your site

Sorry, but I think you are completely wrong with this one, relevance is Google's key motivator and domain is not key to relevance at all.

They will include a site in a regional google due to it's top level domain, but its an inclusion indicator not a ranking indicator.

I didn't mean with regards to ranking I meant with relevancy to a particular user. The request in WMC to specify a geo location if a site targets a particular area - I didn't mean a domain would be excluded because of it's suffix.

same here, seems like nothing happened...

I have said this for 3 months.

There have been issues with the .com. i mean for instance in gambling you will see that 888 and a few others will end up going 100+ one day and the next be back to 1st - 10th. where they are 1st -5th in co.uk. Its some sort of geo location issue, but i feel it could also be a large bounce rate issue. I mean with these casinos not accepting USA players it could be USA visits bounce 99% of the time where as UK visits will be significantly lower (and portals would have a lower bounce rate in USA if i think about it too, as they will show which websites accept USA players.)

Anyone considered this?

Yea i completely agree (above post) - i think google is taking a much bigger stance on user behavior... i mean wouldnt this just mean that webpages on say stumbleupon and things like that would get all the weight?

or rather wouldnt creating the best thing for stumbleupon and things like it be the best way to rank?

I am a strong believer in the theory that google is increasing the weighting being placed on user behavior. To me bounce rate would be the most obvious way to do this. Google has also told us they are trying to improve their geotargetting. But its a big jump from those two things that user behavior is being used to geo target ranks in a country specific way. I find it hard to even get my mind around how that could be done.

Time will tell i s'pose. I personally am not seeing anything other than normal flux in the serps I am watching.

Yea time will tell, but i feel its more then possible... it would of course detract from the links is king rule anyway which im sure google are constantly trying to do, and more place influence of the content of a website.

this would mean that link building will be no more?