Is this type of activity normal?

[jmorehouse]

One of our pages has been significantly changing positions over the past few weeks. I know that some daily fluctuation is normal, but this seems a bit extreme. Any insight as to why this might be happening?

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[Andy.Drinkwater]

I wouldn't say it's necessarily normal, but it certainly isn't uncommon. I do see this sort of thing quite a lot, and oddly enough, I see it most on internal pages.

Is there on-going work happening on the site? Are changes being made frequently? Have you also tried other tracking apps, as I do know that some are not quite as accurate as others and report differently.

-Andy

[jmorehouse]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the reply. It's good to know it's not uncommon, and it is an internal page. I haven't tried any other tracking apps, but I might have to give that a shot to see if it reports the same findings.

As far as ongoing work, we did make a few changes to the page in late April/early May. We modified a few on-page ranking factors to boost our Moz page grade for that query, but that's unfortunately when the initial drop happened from #8 to out of the top 50. We've since reverted a few of these changes and haven't touched it for about a month.

-Joel

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's always a tricky one when changes have been made and reverted Joel. There is an element of waiting for things to settle down again, while a part of you wants to carry on and make more improvements - but this can work against you.

It 'looks' like Google is trying to figure out where you should be, but I don't think it is anything more sinister than that. It's certainly not a penalty at work as they give you a hit and rarely see movement like this.

I would monitor the stats for another couple of weeks and then see where you stand. If it levels out, you at least know where you need to be heading and what changes to make next.

-Andy