Major SERP Fluctuation

[corwin]

I'm working on iDeal Chooser, a Comparison Shopping site and we've been having a weird problem with some of our major keywords on Google for the past couple of months. We keep moving between the first page of the results to disappearing completely. For example a Google search for "price drop alerts" returns idealchooser.com as result 3-5 for a while and suddenly doesn't return us at all, then we are back to the top results only to disappear again later.

We can't figure out what causes it, we didn't see any pattern and it seems completely random. We can be the 4th result for 2 weeks and suddenly we are gone for another 2 weeks. SEOmoz PRO had some good SEO suggestions which we implemented, however nothing that could explain this and even after fixing these issues this weird behavior continues.

Any idea will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[choiceenergy]

Are you possibly looking from an account that is associated with the domain(webmaster tools/analytics/ etc...) while logged into google, vs sometimes not looking at it while logged in?

If it's your site, it seems that it will be more favorable to show you high up in rankings.  At least htat is something i experience.   Unless this is an automated ranking that is showing you this.

Otherwise, i have a site that i will be in the top 10 for lots of things - then if i use another browser where i'm not logged in, it  will be between 10-70 spots higher.

[corwin]

Thanks for the reply Travis, but that's not it. I'm using a proxy server to test my real position, so I'm not getting personalized results. Also SEOmoz PRO who I configured to track this keyword for me was saying I'm the 5th result and later that I'm not at the top 50.

[choiceenergy]

No problem, I just know it's one of those items that you can sometimes overlook without thinking about it.

Is this something that is just going up and down like a rollercoaster?    Have you changed anything from title/h2 tags and even any link structures.   Also any links that may of been in google webmaster tools that are now returning 404 errors.  (had a huge issue w/ some wordpress stuff and a 404 error rewrite.   - Once fixed, my rankings surged almost instantly and have maintained a constant level.)

[KristinaKledzik]

Is your search traffic increasing when you see your site ranking and decreasing when you don't?

[corwin]

Yeah, very much a rollercoaster behavior, just an example: 12 days high, 10 days low, 11 days high, 10 low, 5 high, 8 low, 3 high, 7 low and it just keeps going randomly.

I made few changes to titles and URL structure, but nothing major and I've seen this up and down behavior even between changes. Every change to a page URL was replaced with 301 to the new URL, no 404 from Google crawl.

[corwin]

Thanks for the reply Kristina.

Yes, very much so, when I'm low I barely see any traffic from Google and when I'm high I see reasonable numbers, at least numbers I'm fine with considering the site is relatively new.

[KristinaKledzik]

Ouch. Could you give us an example of one of the keywords that you're seeing these weird ranking issues with?

[corwin]

Sure, "price drop alerts" without the quotes, about 10 days ago I was the 5th results, now I'm practically not there at all. If the past is any indication I'll be back up at some point.

[KristinaKledzik]

Well, I can see that competition for "price drop alerts" is just slightly outranking you, so it's possible that as you or one of your competitors gains or loses a link, rankings are reshuffled, pulling you on and off of the page.

If that's the case, increasing your back links will help keep you at the top.

Hopefully someone else on this forum has had this problem and will be able to give you more specific advice, though!

[corwin]

Thanks Kristina. I believe there's something else I'm missing here, not just regular back links, because of the length of time it's been going on for and the huge fluctuations I'm seeing.

On the other hand, since I can't figure out what's going on, I guess it could be anything

[corwin]

And now I'm back to the top SERP results for my main keywords. For example "price drop alerts" now returns my site as the 4th results after being gone from the first 5 pages for about 10 days. No major changes to the site or links to it that can explain it. I can literally pinpoint the exact hour it happen, yesterday between 6 and 7pm NY. Suddenly my Google organic traffic multiplied by 50 or even 60.

I'm obviously very happy to get decent traffic again, but knowing the past patterns, this will only last for few days followed by few more days of being gone again over and over.

If anyone has a clue what can cause this, I'd be very happy to know about it.