Questions
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Does anyone know why some keyword rankings go from nowhere in the top 50 to ranking 1st to then nowhere in the top 50 in the space of 3 weeks?
Hi Kate Likely Causes user metrics - Google has thought to have been using things like click through rate, and when users bounce back to the SERP and click on another result - as part of their algorithm. In other words, they have user metrics (kind of like their own analytics) to detect how happy users are with the results in the SERPs - and I have heard that this is a possible cause for "the Google Dance" **multiple pages alternate rankings for one keyword **- maybe you have a few pages that are similar in content, and Google has a hard time figuring out which is which - and the ranking page for a particular keyword keeps switching - this would cause dramatically different rankings. could be the nature of weekly rank tracking - Moz rank tracking IS accurate for sure - but Google will sometimes move things around slightly. If Moz happens to check the ranking in this small window, where Google has shifted something for just a moment, then it looks like for the entire week you've been in a totally different position. Suggestions evaluate your "search queries" metrics - in webmaster tools they give you metrics like "impressions" and "click through rate" - check them out for the keywords in question that are seeing the Google Dance. You can pull this data from WMT into analytics quite easily. See if you're getting poor metrics for click through rate. ALSO - webmaster tools will give you their average position (ranking!) straight from Google. look at what THEY have for your average position for those keywords - maybe you're jumping there too. look at how many landings pages there are for one keyword - using webmaster tools or analytics data, see if one keyword is resulting in many landing pages. If so, try to focus just one page on the topic for each keyword. **supplement weekly rankings **- run SEO Book's rank checker (free plugin) a few other times during the week and see what you come up. As mention above, look at webmaster tools average position data (rankings!) and compare data. Hope this helps! -Dan
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