Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly

[forgottenlife]

Hello,

We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this.  The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago.  At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request.  Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site.  We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving.  Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings".  However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found.  If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3!

We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned).  We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores.  The results are the same.  Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time.  We just could not understand why this is happening.  Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months.

Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice?  Many thanks!

[GPainter]

All though possible I would imagine Google would of sent out a warning or similar if there was some sort of penalty.

[Milian]

Could this possibly be connected to Google's Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?

How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?

-Dan

[forgottenlife]

Thank you for checking this for us and confirming that something is not right, I thought I was going crazy...

I will try to contact Google via webmaster tools (perhaps filing another consideration request) to prompt a reply.

If anybody have any suggestions it would be much appreciated thanks!

[GPainter]

Could be how Google are delivering their results as mentioned or a bug when they tweaked their algorithm, you could try and rock the boat and email them via webmasters though don't expect them to really help out much they are pretty secretive bunch. Have you found no change on the search with active SEO ? I presume there has been some sort of SEO going on though its a really odd thing

[Milian]

Ok Now I've just got home and did the search again on a different machine, and indeed you weren't within the first 10 pages on an initial search, but appeared top of page 3 on a second search.

How bizarre, but unfortunately I cannot offer a solution either.

[onlinechester]

That is strange. Using firefox I first searched for you and you werern't in the top 10 pages. I then performed the same search and you were right at the top of page 3.

I can't offer a solution/ reason but i'd be really interested if someone else could!

[Milian]

Unfortunately I could not recreate your issue.

I just did the same search and in firefox you appeared first time on page 4, position 32. I did the search in Chome on another machine and you appeared first time on page 4 in the same position.