Organic Rank Volitility

[freestone]

Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly.  I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results.

The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment.

What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked.  Four days later back on page 1.  These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ?  Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one.

Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings?

Thought?

[EGOL]

If you read the book:  In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (recommended reading for any SEO) you will learn how many people get "test SERPs".

Google does a lot of testing and I believe that they have been especially active at testing recently.

[freestone]

I will take a look.  I have never monitored rankings this closely before but we are making on-page changes and resubmitting in webmaster to try in help with the huge hit from Penguin.

So many opinions on things to do / change out there it is hard to know what to do but I figured a complete re-visit of key page on-page for all the product category pages was the first step.

So much is written about SEO but so little of it covers the unique issue that you have if you are doing e-commerce seo....for example if I have a category page and display 50 products per page on that category and 40 of the product have the keyword of the page in the product name.  There is no way to really reduce the stuffing.  The irony is I could reduce the stuffing but it would make the site less effective/ appropriate for the end user of the site.

If the on-page changed do not help I guess we will turn attention to getting more good backlinks to offset the non-sense site that have backlink to us for no good reason.

Back-links - I could rail for hours about this topic.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd add to EGOL's response by offering this.  Anyone who obsesses with checking rankings every day will miss bigger picture, longer-term trends.  Every single day not only is Google testing, but there are countless other changes happening on the web to at least temporarily impact many results.  Other sites in the same niche, news content, social media buzz, other SEOs working in the same niche... it all can impact short term results.

The other factor is if you're checking results while logged in to Google, and/or not using the &PWS=0 method for checking non-personalized results, because Google ALWAYS alters personalized results to one extent or another, and every search you do, further impacts ever next search.  This is especially made worse because they're always wanting to algorithmically provide a variety of results, in the notion that if they do so, they may eventually give you something you'll click on and not return to search for.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Also be aware that it's a waste of time to frequently check to see if what you've done has helped you recover from Penguin. Penguin hit sites will ONLY see improvements if they have made the right changes, however that will only be reflected when Google actually refreshes the Penguin algorithm, and so far nobody has been able to report that a Penguin update has even happened yet.

Micromanagement of SEO is a death-knell.  Do what you believe to be the right thing for the right reasons, and breathe....

[freestone]

Thanks for the thoughts.  I get it.  Anyone doing SEO on a site can only read and react with what is deemed appropriate and prudent changes.

I resubmitted a few key pages and was seeing if there was a quick reaction.  I have never done this before and just thought it was strange and wondered if anyone had an explanation.  I will go back to waiting for Moz to crawl and send me my campaigns reports.

Thanks to you both for the input.   I am just very frustrated.  We never received any warning from Google about link farms.  Have really not done any back-linking in 5 or 6 years, have never been hit by any algorithmic change till now.  While I figured one day it might happen it does not make it any less frustrating.

I realize I am too far down in the details those that say on here to just wait are nuts. Obviously some action is required or we would not have been knocked down.

[AlanBleiweiss]

John,

Believe me - we all understand how frustrating it can be, and how difficult it can be to go with the patience path.  So I totally feel your pain!