Keyword Ranks Jumping all over? Top 10 to 40 back to top 5?

[dwebb007]

So thanks to MOZ I now can track my very large website which has several hundred pages built for specific keywords. The problem is that If I have a page built for a keyword like "equipment transport" for example, and one week that keyword will rank top 5 and the next week in the 40's and then all the way back up to top 5 or 10 again. Google is bouncing these pages/keywords around like a trampoline would. How do I stop this. Do I need to make changes to slow down how often I want the pages to be crawled? In my research this is what I am hoping the problem is because my 1200 page site has no consistency on a 1000 keywords. One week 350 increase and the next week 600 decrease. And I track each keywords changes week to week in an excel sheet. Feedback would be greatly appreciated, because until I can get these pages to quit bouncing around so much a lot of my efforts are pretty much a waste as I can seo a top 5 ranked page/keyword that is ranked 40th the next week and back down to top 5 because of the lack of consistency.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

There was a great answer from Andy Drinkwater in this Q+A thread - I suggest checking it out. You also have to consider your industry and the keyword difficulty. Have you checked your on-page grades at all? This can help you prioritize.

Let me know - hope this helps - good luck!

[JC-Blake]

Many times when I have had this happen it settled fairly quickly when I made sure that the links I had coming directly to the site were established 2.0's or other site. I have found that when the links that come in are coming from new (ish) sites it made the site I was monitoring jump quite a bit.  That being said I do believe there is something to the mouse trap theory where the big G is looking for changes to happen on a bounce with the idea it is someone trying to game the system.

As for on-site metrics make sure you are solid and follow your grades to establish a good foundation and to build everything else you are trying to accomplish on that.

Make sure you are linking in with established sites and remember that slow and steady with a good social and citation presence will win the race when it comes to client sites.

With Respect.

[Stramark]

Do not try to slow down the crawl rate, that would be bad for your site and not a good strategy.

Investigate what pages are not jumping around. pages i have experienced to jump around are algoritmic penalty kind of jumping. (over optimized or duplicated content or low authority)