Rankings Up and Down Every Single Week

[Linwright]

This is so insanely frustrating. One week my client's rankings will be great, working up the second page and on our way to the first. The next week those rankings will drop (according to SEOMoz Rankings) to well below 50. The very next week those rankings will be back up on the second page.

It's like a pinball machine with a different rank every week. I'm doing absolutely nothing from week to week, and am not understanding why it's bouncing back and forth so much. I've never seen anything like it, actually. I've never had a client bounce up and down so frequently and in such huge numbers.

Any ideas? (http://erasedisease.com) Thanks

[SEODinosaur]

This can really be one of many reasons.

This may be a case of unnatural link building. You have 617 links of which 594 are anchored "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">l arginine". Its best practice to use variations of your keywords when linking in.</a>

<a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="background-color: initial;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Also the home page looks very very busy.  Too many colors and graphics, user interaction might be the issue, maybe people get to your site and leave because of the clutter.</a>

How long has this site been live? was it ranking well in the past (statically) and now its starting to lose ranking (de-indexing)?

Have you checked your webmaster tools?

[Linwright]

Interesting. It goes from 16 and 18 for "l-arginine supplements' (the exact keyword we want to rank for) to below 50. This happens week by week for the past 5 or six weeks.

The site has been live for quite some time now, but we recently redesigned about 7 months ago. It's never ranked well, but since I've come on board we've been working slowly up the rankings to the second page. Then, ever since we've managed to get on page two this bounce back and forth has been happening.

I consistently check webmaster tools and everything seems to be good as far as that's concerned. I mean it's crazy when you look at the overall traffic from week to week. One week we will have wonderful and consistent traffic, the next week we'll have absolutely nothing, almost as if we've been flagged, then the flag is removed, then flagged again. It's so very strange.

I agree about the look of the site, but that part is out of my hands. Bounce rate is consistently 55% to 66% every week.

[Linwright]

PS -  Load time on the site was at over 140 seconds...perhaps this is the root of the problem.

[Mcarle]

Their is no ONE problem....

ALL the issues brought up need to be addressed:

1. Get more varied anchor text links, get text links that reflect the other ingredients in your product as well as supplements, pills, and the like...

2. Get that load time down!!!!

3. Clean up the clutter, MAKE your client get it done.

ALL these things will help with bounce rate & customers buying.

[SEODinosaur]

4. Their should be There!

NIce you could just copy and paste next time... lol

Fact is it can be ONE of these things most likely unnatural link building.

[SEODinosaur]

Yes that could be the ONE issue causing the problem.

[EGOL]

Google is not Google these days.

In addition to personalized search there are many variations of the SERPs that you can see when logged out of any Google service.

Your location can change the rankings.

Your browser can change your rankings.

Your previous searches can change your rankings.

I also believe that if you have two sites in the same SERP that one might be demoted significantly.

Soon they will be able to display different rankings to right-handed people and left-handed people.  

[Linwright]

Right, right...I mean that's basic, beginner SEO stuff. These are personalized search results, but search results based on SEOMoz Rankings Reports.

[stubby]

All I can say is WOW!

If not for the rankings, change this for the users!

I can virtually guarantee that your bounce rates will go down and sales will go up if you get that load time down.

Hopefully that load time is with a slow dial up connection.  Nobody with a modem waits that long.  After 10-15 seconds the assumption is that the website is broken, and they leave....

[Linwright]

I feel you on that one, however it's completely out of my hands. The client had this site completely redesigned before I came along. It is what it is. Actually with some farther research I found that the load time on the Home Page was over 200 seconds...something is definitely wrong here.

[Runner2009]

I see this is a Wordpress site.

Running a Web Page Test your real problem is the Time To First Byte - generally a poor figure here points directly at bottle necks with your server .

I see that you are using a number of jQuery scripts locally instead of through CDN.  The first thing I would do would be to go into the function.php file and deregister those scripts and then register them so that they access the google depository for jQuery scripts and others.

This will help by decreasing wait time on parallel http request and that you will find some of the vistiors will have those scripts already cached.  All this sounds complex, but it is really simple to do.

You can use the add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'your_function_name') to wp_dergister_scripts and wp_register_scripts .  You just have to look for the name space that the theme registered the script to de_register it correctly.  (lol this sounds hard)

easiest one is the jquery most themes use the 'jquery' for the namespace so it would be like this i:

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'new_scripts');

function new_scripts() {

wp_deregister_script('jquery');

wp_register_script('jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js', false, '17.1');

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');

}

Because of the issue with TTFB,  I would look into is a relatively new WordPress Centric hosting.  I've just started using them and they are very good .... WP Engine  they can help with the TTFB  issues as they are running varnish cache and supposedly have something even faster in the works called TachyCache.