2 almost identical key-phrases with opposite ranking trajectories

[vibelingo]

I recently checked rank-tracking of a client's search-phrases. In Google UK variations of 2 almost identical search phrases dropped 30 places for one of these and jumped 30 places for the other. The only difference between the 2 phrases being the site's location (city) was placed first in phrase A and last in Phrase B. There were no technical or content changes on-site- How can this be?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, can you drop in the phrases and related pages? Hard to comment on the above without a little more info.

[A_Q]

It might well be a duplicate content issue. If you have two pages which are almost identical with the only difference being the city name. Google may have classed this as duplicate content and chosen to rank one page much higher than the other.

Like Marcus said - it would be useful to have a bit more information.

[StalkerB]

Do you mean that there is a single page for both these terms?

So Page A was in position 50 for "keyword + location" & "location + keyword".

"keyword + location" now returns Page A in position 80

"location + keyword" now returns Page A in position 20

[vibelingo]

Hi Elias,

I'm aware that there are duplicate content issues on the site, and as I'm not a developer I'm not privy to the complexity of the problem. But, I haven't seen such a significant change for one url before, tracking two almost identical terms for the same url.

[vibelingo]

hi, yes that is correct.

[StalkerB]

How long has it been like that? Do you track daily and the trend has been up/down or is this just a spot check?

I've not seen such dramatic swings before, but it does happen. Can you add the opposite phrase in the title somewhere?

"Location keyword - Get keyword in Location"

or something similar (recommended keyword in location, buy keyword in location) without it looking out of place?

That should bring it back more in line.

Has somebody linked to you with "location keyword" anchor text to push that version up?

Or have competitors been working on "keyword location" and not the other way round?

Hard to tell really and I'm not sure how to test it

[vibelingo]

hi,

this is something I check weekly (more or less), and it appears to be a sudden change. We are naturally working on attracting links with good anchor-texts esp. including location, but there has certainly been no aggressive push regarding this lately. I could try the "Location keyword - Get keyword in Location" approach without it looking out of place. Normally I'm cautious regarding repeating keywords in title-tags, but in this case it could make sense...

[KeriMorgret]

I'm following up on old threads in Q&A that are still marked unanswered.. Did this continue to happen, or did it ever settle out? Did you figure out why it happened at all?