Rankings and visibility fluctuating wildly from week to week

[chill986]

I have 1 campaign (out of 9) that has it's ranking fluctuating wildly from week to week - and in the past 3 weeks, it's tanked, and the next week come back, and this week, tanked again (what I mean by that is Keyphrases ranking #1 dropping to +51 - I had over 20 keyphrases (both local and universal) that were ranked in the top 10 (many in the top 3) that are now at 18 or higher.

I have not changed anything on the website in the last 3 weeks, but I've been working with Yoast SEO Pro to add in metadata, titles etc.  The content, managed by the marketing manager, is basically unchanged.  Help!!! This is the second time this has happened and our top competitor went from where we are now to #1 - We've been flipflopping week after week.  Not good.

I have also been getting an increased # of 803 and 804 crawl errors. Jon with Moz added me to the next beta cohort, but I can't imagine that this has anything to do with Google ranking.  I have 2 campaigns experiencing a high number of 803-804 crawl errors but only this one with the dramatic ranking and visibility swings.

mccdental.com is the domain for the campaign.

I appreciate any insight.  Newish client - NOT good.

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there Cindy,

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

I'll address the 803 error first (it looks as though you're already working through the cause of the 804 error in terms of being added to the Beta).

When you see an 803 error, that means your site closed its TCP connection to our crawler before our crawler could read a complete HTTP response. You don't see this error when you go to the page in your browser because content-length is an outdated component for modern browsers and they will disregard this error, but the intention of our crawler is to report any errors that might be occurring. So the crawler is configured to detect and report such errors.

I'm not a web dev (since I'm just here to support our tools) so I can't exactly tell you how to fix this issue (much as I wish I could!). However, one of our very trusted community members, Sha Menz, has a great answer regard 803 errors here: https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-fix-an-803-error

With respect to a large dip in rankings, it's important to keep in mind that Google tweaks their algorithm frequently in minor ways. This will usually have very acute impacts on particular search sectors, which almost always normalize quickly which is likely what's been happening in these cases.

Keeping in mind that each weekly rankings update is just a snapshot from a particular moment in time, I would recommend using Mozcast as a resource to help determine how turbulent Google SERPs are on any given day. It's also worth mentioning that we would always advocate for examining your rankings over a large period of time, in order to exclude extreme outliers.

I hope this helps to clarify but do let our team know if you have any further questions!

[chill986]

Well no.  Why is only one of 9 campaigns effected (don't get me wrong, I'm relieved it's ONLY one.)

[samantha.chapman]

Hi Cindy,

I'm afraid it's a little bit difficult to isolate - as I mentioned, the Google search algorithms generally will usually have very acute impacts on particular search sectors so this could explain why you're seeing it only with one campaign and no others at this point (you may see this happen with others in the future). To investigate any potential algorithm changes, you'll need to check out our tools:
http://mozcast.com/
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
https://moz.com/blog/rankings-history-new-features-moz-pro

That client's competition may also be working on their SEO strategies so that's something you'd also want to take into consideration. To investigate any other potential causes, you may need to work with your own SEO consultant to dive in a little deeper.

[chill986]

That would be great, however I AM the SEO consultant.

What tool would you recommend to identify potential bad backlinks?