Flopping

cw1865 · #1 (**permalink**) 10-26-2007, 10:54 PM

I am just curious, why does my website 'flop' positions drastically. For one website I'm popping up on page 2 spot 1, but then the next day its at position 94, then today at position 49, this seems odd, you would think google would've 'zeroed' in the site? Should there be such wide variations?

**mjtaylor** · #2 (**permalink**) 10-26-2007, 11:29 PM

There is an update going on, or Google is testing data centers - apparently. Some fluctuations are normal, but there does seem to be wider than normal swings. For example, read this thread.

cass-hacks · #3 (**permalink**) 10-27-2007, 12:54 AM

Besides MJ's reply, another possibility is that your site, as a whole, is on the edge of one or more signals, likely more, and that as the pages of the site are crawled, and possibly links to your site are crawled as well, things flip flop back and forth across some invisible line.

There really is no way to know if that is the case for sure without carefully going to crawl logs and comparing SERPs positions over time to look for a correlation and even at that, it is not necessarily going to give one a clear idea of what is happening although sometimes you can get lucky.

If it is not a case of Data centers being out of sync and the site does appear to flip flop back and forth over a longer period of time than data center issues would suggest, one way or another it would seem to be a sign of Google changing its evaluation of your site differently as it crawls different pages.

I know that doesn't seem to make much sense but if you can find a correlation between crawls and SERPs, it may point you in the dirrection of what pages or conditions may be causing the problem.