Website dropping from Page 1 pos 5 to no ranking and then back again?

[Jon_bangonline]

Hi all,

We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company.

Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent.

Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed.

I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior?

I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine.

Thanks

Jon

[EGOL]

Google has lots of different indexes and serves them to whoever has a query routed to a server that uses them.

In other words.  There are many indexes running simultaneously.  Some have older data than others.  Some have different algos.  And some could be responding to different devices, cookies, browsers, etc that you are using or where you are searching from.

Google has many thousands  of servers running in many data centers in different parts of the world.  They are not all the same.  Lots are running experiments to see how searchers respond to different presentations of the SERPs.

If you want to learn more about this read the book "In the Plex".  Very interesting and highly recommended reading for any SEO.  If you don't read it you do not understand google.  Honest.

[EnvoyWeb]

EGOL brings up a strong point.  Offering in your terms to bring strong SERPS to a client that can be measured by the day is not for the faint of heart.  You mentioned that it's a semi-competitive keyword and there is HUGE variance going on... here are some questions that should help us give you some more specific advice.

Are you watching what your competition is doing? (links, anchor text, etc)
Is there anything automated in what you are using for off page seo?  
What have you done to get the ranking for this keyword since you started on page and off page?

[Jon_bangonline]

Thanks for your replies guys, I will look into the book EGOL suggested.

The competition is not doing a huge amount from what I can see in terms of effective link building. Like I say it is competitive but not hugely competitive. Much of what they are doing is quite standard link building.
From what we are doing:
Nothing automated at all. Like I say the client had a penalty and we removed it, and the last thing we want to do is get them another one.

We are focused on several different link building tactics such as gaining links from their industry suppliers, getting links for companies that stock their products - both highly relevant for the industry.

Guest blogging is something that we are doing a little of each month but focusing the anchor text around their brand and keeping the content nice and relevant.

We have looked at gain some high authority directory links such as Yahoo BOTW etc to gain some more established links for the profile.

On-page we have been adhering to all the best practices in regards to content, title tags, blog content etc http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

The client isn't doing huge amounts on social media, but they are doing some - so I would say that is the weakness.

We are monitoring 30 keywords and the majority are behaving inline with common expectations and also improving gradually. It is this one keyword that I know the previous SEO really abused the anchor text for which is the main issue.

[gazzerman1]

Was it an unnatural links penalty? Around what date did your search results start to return?

[Jon_bangonline]

Yes it was an unatural links penalty that we solved by using the links disavow tool and reconsideration requests. I would say that we saw improvement on some keywords quite instantly but others lets say 1 month after wards.

There has now been about 4 months since we had it lifted and generally speaking we have seen improvements apart from this one keywords (which the client is heavily focused on).

Thoughts?