Page 4 - Major Fluctuations. New update?

Originally Posted by channel5

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.

Originally Posted by peterh

I run a .com site (though hosted in the UK) which targets the UK market for a competitive financial term. The top 4 results for this have been fixed for the past 6 months however I have now moved from position 4 to position 2 during the last week. This has almost doubled my traffic!

I have also noticed that the site at position 5 is constantly changing (every 6 - 12 hours) with a seemingly random site from page 2 of the SERPS.

Something is defiantly going on with the Google UK SERPS. My theory is that Google wants to see how users interact with other sites in the top 20 results at the moment. How it will use this data will be very interesting.