Improvement in rankings then site dissapears from SERPS?

[SamCUK]

Yesterday I saw significant improvements in rankings and the first page resulapp for several keywords appeared to have changed and included my site. Today the results appear to have reverted back and my site is nowhere to be seen. At least before I was in the top 100 but now I'm nowhere?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Until a site reaches a point of stabilization, rankings could very well fluctuate.  Many reasons can cause this.

1. Search engines continually test different results.

2. More than one algorithm has to be processed and they don't all update on the same day. So one algorithm may assign a certain ranking value, and another may alter that.

3. An algorithm update could literally change the landscape overnight.  Even that could be temporary since updates are followed by real world reviews of their impact, and adjustments can be made.

4. Other sites in the system for those phrases could have had significant changes to their SEO or the  way algorithms view those as well.

For all of these reasons and more, this is why short term evaluations are difficult at best to understand, and trends are more important.

[SamCUK]

Should I expect my site to bounce back at some point? I've been link building but via guest posts which as far as I understand is white hat. I've been careful to vary anchor texts and use url/brand linking. I think if it was an anchor text penalty it would apply to that specific page. It seems odd the site is not returned in the SERPS for any keywords whatsoever.

[AlanBleiweiss]

My best suggestion is to give it a bit of time to see what happens.  How long has the site been up?  If it's been a short while (relatively speaking) it can take longer to stabilize.

Alternately, have you done a site: check to see if it's at least still in the index?

[SamCUK]

Yea it's still in the index. Its about 6 months old but I've only been working on it the last couple of months. I guess its just a waiting game.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Unfortunately, all we can do sometimes is to keep marching forward and observe.  If no improvement comes at some point, then more answers need to be sought out.