Wednesday, December 2, 2009

5 Reasons Why Your Google Web Page Ranking Fluctuates

As a Search Engine Optimizer, I often receive inquiries from Webmasters or Business Owners asking why sometimes they see their web page rankings appear on the first page of Google but to disappear after a few days. Based on my experiences, there are a few reasons why your web pages encounter these drastic ranking changes.

The first reason is because your website is very new. If you have just created your website and put it online last week, you may be able to see your web page ranks on first page of Google for your keywords - for example, when you search for your company name. However, the ranking disappears after a few days. This is a very common thing that happens to new sites. Some people call this the Google Ranking Bounce effect. Do not worry about this issue because your ranking will come back in a few weeks time once it stabilizes.

The second reason is the frequency of fresh incoming links. If there are no incoming links pointing to your web page for a few weeks, you will find a drop in your rankings in Google. This is because of the freshness relevancy. Search Engines loves fresh incoming links and this is one of the ways to make sure that your site is still fresh and there are people linking to you for your content. So make sure you put up a great piece of content to draw in some links from other sites at least in a monthly basis.

Unstable linking strategies will also affects your rankings. For example, if most of the links pointing to your web page is from forums and when the forum owners start to switch the forum links to no-follow or hide the signature links, you will find that your rankings drop overnight. This is what I call the unstable linking strategy. It is better for you to get other people linking to you willingly instead of you going around creating or asking for links. Thus, you really need to come out with something that will make people talk and link to you.

The fourth reason is pretty straightforward. Some people will find that their rankings drops a lot when they search using different computers. One of the reasons is because they have logged into their Google account when searching. Never ever log-in to your Google account when searching as this will make all the search results customized to your history. I always do a search using another browser without my previous cookies and log-in information. This ensures that I will be seeing results that other people sees as well.

The last reason is that you may have changed your content especially your title tag. To me, I would avoid making drastic changes to title tags as they are the most important part of your web page when Google allocates you the relevancy. Hence, always make little changes to your page unless you are sure what you are doing. Making little changes and tracking the results is a safer route to ensure that your ranking does not fluctuates too much.

I hope that you will find the above tips useful and do keep them in mind as these are the most common pitfalls people jump into accidentally.

1 comment:

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