Why are my SERPs fluctuating 60+/- on a weekly basis?
-
I have a blog that's gone from not indexed, to indexed and ranked around 85 on 3 target key phrases. With a bit of SEO the blog jumped to around 11th on those 3 key phases in a week or so. Now, the following week, it has bombed back to 76th. Why the dramatic fluctuations?
-
Hey Karl,
I think Keri pretty much summed it up. You can edit the source in WordPress. On your WordPress dashboard home page, navigate to Appearance --> Editor. On the right sidebar of that page you should see a list of different links that navigate to different areas of your theme editor. Navigate to Header. This should be where the changes need to be made, but you can check all the pages for your theme if you are concerned. What pages are there will be a bit different for everyone depending on the theme. I'd always recommend saving a backup of your original theme before making changes though!
But I think taking Keri's advice and adding more quality content and getting rid of any suspect outbound links should help a lot.
-
My husband is here having a good laugh with me over the URL that I brought up just as he came in from the garage. "It's from Q&A and it's work related honey, honest!"
Have you viewed your source? Do you know about the link to an adult site with an H1 about bondage that's in there? Your privacy policy also has a link to car insurance on it. There's an affiliate link to the Socrates theme, too. If none of those are yours, I'd suggest removing them. Might help, certainly can't hurt.
I put one phrase from your site into Google, and found a couple of dozen sites that had that phrase. To be honest, you've got a real thin site without much content, and if the content you do have is not unique, there's not much compelling reason for the search engines to return your site instead of another site. Open Site Explorer reports links from nine different domains, and most of them look like profile links.
I'd first focus on getting some unique content in there, making sure that your site is clean without hidden links or text, get content in there that someone would want to link to, then focus on linking.
-
Thanks Keri - I do have the campaign actively running and tracked here in SEOmoz, and regularly check the SERPs in scroogle.org. the URL is www.getoverabrokenheart.org (cheesy, I know), with the three key phrases:
"get over a broken heart, getting over a broken heart, getting over broken heart"
The blog is set up to act as an affiliate arm in a sales funnel for an online product.
Hope that helps. Any rank performance information and suggestions would be great.
Thanks again!
-
How are you checking these SERPs? Are you using the same computer/browser each time? Are you logged into a Google account with personalization and cache some/all of the time? That can really affect things.
Try consistently checking from a browser that is in private browsing mode, which will help to minimize the personalization used for your search results. The SEOmoz Rank Tracker should also be able to provide you with ranking data that is non-personalized.
Are you able to share with us your URL and three key phrases?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What would the US traffic increase be for a website YoY if all Google SERP rankings remained the same?
This question has come up a few times with some of our clients and I've spent some time researching this question, but I can't find an answer online so hopefully, someone at MOZ has this data available to them with all the data they collect. The data points that would be needed to answer this question off the top of my head: Increase in the # of Google Searches in the US YoY The decrease in CTR for organic results "10 blue links" which take a searcher off of Google YoY, as Google continues to keep more searchers on Google.com with rich snippets, increased AdWords prominence, AdWords extensions, etc I'm sure this greatly varies per industry, but an average for all industries is all that is needed to answer this client question. Many thanks in advance and I've included a video which hopefully helps to better explain the search "plus/minus" that we can expect to see as SEOs in 2018. WF1yLlJC6LetnpbD3
Search Behavior | | WebpageFX1 -
Strategy for 301s/404s
Hi all, We receive a feed containing new products every morning, some products are removed and this obviously ends up in Webmaster as a 404. Is it fine to leave this as a 404 or would 301'ing the link be a better option? If we leave as a 404 we end up with thousands after a couple of month which scares me and makes finding actual 404s more difficult. Essentially, if lots of pages are being removed everyday, what's the best way of tackling these? Thanks!
Search Behavior | | HB170 -
Do sever errors affect SERPS
hoping someone can help VPS has been causing me 10 days of server errors (im now moving off it) as my wordpress site has kept running out of memory. At the same time my traffic had dropped. Could google and bing be penalising me for number of errors, dropping me in SERPS and resulting in web traffic?
Search Behavior | | mutant20080 -
Is putting/removing Adsense ads on the site affects crawling for seo?
Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w
Search Behavior | | CruiseControl0 -
Seller rating in Serps
Hello everyone, I saw something weird today with my own site in Google: http://www.google.nl/webhp?hl=nl&tab=ww#hl=nl&sclient=psy-ab&q=xenon+h4&fp=534989fd828f8f2e&pws=0 The site you see position one is my site (HIDxenonverlichting.nl), you see the seller rating with the stars, but also nearly 2 rules of price information: ''Prijsklasse: Normale prijs: € 79,99 Tijdelijke prijs € 74,99 Inclusief 21% BTW & Gratis verzending!' At this site i don't even have MicroData installed for the reviews or prices, and i've never seen such a long price description in Google. So i was wondering, how could this happen, because i want this much information also at other product pages of course. But then first need to know how this happened? Regards, Yannick
Search Behavior | | iwebdevnl0 -
Google Places rankings go away, but organic rankings stay the same / get better?
Hello, I hope you all can help me out here with the information I could provide. Anyways, the past number of months I have had 1 of our clients rank extremely high organically and on Google places. For example: My client is a law firm so if you search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” they would come up organically on the first page and if you were in that town and search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” or even just “Attorney” they would also come up in the Google Places list. Now for some reason starting a week ago I noticed they have completely disappeared from Google Places. No changes have been done to their site and everything is the same as it was. Their organic searches are the same if not better than before. Do you guys have any clue as to why this happened and how I could possibly turn this around? Thanks for your help in advance!
Search Behavior | | WhiteHat120 -
Pro/Cons of JUST using Google Analytics
I find myself in a situation where I am having to defend why purely relying on just Google Analytics for site data i.e. exit pages, keywords, bounce rate etc... is not good practise. So I thought/wondered if other people have come up against this. What are the Pro and Cons for ONLY using Google Analytics for your site data....
Search Behavior | | JohnW-UK0 -
What would make a MozRank jump from a 5 to a 9 in a span of two weeks?
Guten tag SEOMozians! I'm looking for your opinions and thoughts regarding MozRank. I recently noticed a website of mine going from a modest MozRank of 5 to an out of the park 9 in the span of two weeks. Any thoughts on where I might look to see what may have caused such a spike? Cheers, Jonathan
Search Behavior | | creativedepartment0