SEO - Why variation in Google positioning? Are we penalized?

[ZOD]

Our webiste is made of 2 different parts hosted in 2 different directory on the same domain:

1. The website itself, which can be seen as a catalog.

2. A blog on WP.

Sometimes we lose 50% of our traffic and 5 to 10 days later the traffic goes up again.

When looking at position in Google it appears that when losses of traffic happen, the Google positions of pages from the website become bad. The blog pages themselves keep their good position. Suddenly after few days we find our previous good postioning and we have a good traffic again.

Here at the questions we have:

1. Why do we have variation on our Google positioning? Which parameters can influence? Bounce rate? Speed?

3. Why only the website is penalized and never the WP blog whereas they are on same domain?

If someone has experienced it before or has a idea, your expertise is welcome...

Thanks.

[Ant71]

Is it quite new domain? This is quite normal for newish domains, think of it as Google testing you out and seeing where you fit best in the rankings.

Do you do much link building, updating the site with fresh content. Continual SEO work on the site will help.

[ZOD]

Hi,

Thanks for your answer.

The domain is not new. (2 years). Not too much link building. Frech content every day.

For example: we have a page which was first on Google research with one keyword for at least 2 years. it brings us a lot of traffic.

Suddenly the page goes down to position 49 for few days and go back to the 1st position. It happen few time since Pinguin.

Right now, we are penalized again and it lasts since 10 days now.

[JustDucky]

Penguin attacks rankings of the pages which ranked for searches where the links that caused the penalty were pointed.  So, you could have a home page that is penalized (b/c the offending links pointed to the home page and the offending links contain high traffic terms) and some, all or none of the individual pages in the blog.  The wild (temporary) fluctuations in the SERP results might be Panda related.

[Unity]

Hi Celine, How are you checking your rankings?