Why are my search engine rankings and traffic consistently changing?

This is one of the most common questions I am asked as an algorithmic search specialist at Neutralize (*\*).   The straight answer  “change is the only constant in the world of algorithmic search”.

There are many reasons why website rankings and traffic levels fluctuate within algorithmic search engines, and it is not always the search engines themselves that have caused the change.  Hopefully our introduction to some of these factors and their impact, will give you and idea of the diversity of influences a optimisation team will be thinking about when they are managing your website positioning.

1. Regional or Worldwide Events and News
2. Competitive Landscape
3. Website Age
4. Unethical Techniques
5. Keyword Density
6. Code Changes
7. Linking
8. Server Issues

Regional or Worldwide Events & News

Off site issues  can contribute a great deal for your keyphrase traffic fluctuating. For example, users buying behaviour and interests will affect the traffic levels on your site depending on the current news, events or even your own offline marketing. This could be seen on a number of our clients travel related sites when the Boxing Day Tsunami disaster in Asia happened. Other examples include, major sporting events, latest movie news and popular TV programmes, each can contribute to sudden surges and declines in popularity of particular topics, and hence traffic from keyphrases related to those topics.

Competitive Landscape

Competitive landscape will always cause rankings to alter; each search engine update (change in the search engines algorithm) will see your ranking fluctuate. This is due to new sites being indexed, redundant sites being removed and current sites amended.

At Neutralize (*\*) we call this constant change the churn rate, in search engines that update more regularly and in more competitive sectors the churn rate of sites moving through the listings can be much higher, and thus your own listings will move more frequently.

Check your competitors website, both the sites ranking above and below you. Ensure you use an ethical search engine optimisation approach, and only apply ethical techniques, which should raise your site above the competition. Likewise check that they are also operating within the search engines published guidelines.

Website Age

This is a grey area of search engine optimisation, especially where search results in Google are concerned. Many optimisers believe Google runs a ‘sandbox’; this is where new or penalised websites go, and the rankings of these website may not be correctly reflected in the search engine results page (SERP) .

Once out of the sandbox Google has a tendency to rank new or amended content high and then over the following weeks or months the websites are likely to find a steadier position. It is from this level you can analyse your site and make necessary optimisation changes to rank higher.

A website could be in the sandbox for over 6 months, but on average 3 months is the norm. If lucky you are may not go into the sandbox at all.

For older sites, don’t let them stagnate, else the reverse will happen and you may see you competition moving above you. Search engines like “fresh content” which is usually relevant and up to date, as search engine spiders have something new to crawl and index. A site that is not updated on a regular basis can be given a lower priority than a “fresh” site; therefore regularly updated sites will normally overtake a stale site within the search results.

Unethical Techniques – Penalized or Blacklisted?

This is as bad as it gets and the effect can be instant and serious.
A site using unethical search engine optimisation techniques can gain very high rankings, and may even achieve top search positions for targeted keyphrases – but if caught could be heavily penalized or blacklisted.

Once penalized, the first thing you’ll notice is that all you search traffic from the particular search engine will stop. Worse though, is that the domain name may never be included within the search index again. This could prove extremely costly and embarrassing if the website belonged to a major brand, with a vested interest in it. If you are a serious business with valuable online assets, taking a non-ethical approach is like playing Russian roulette…it is dangerous, and not something we would recommend.

Google does not always detect a site using hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages. 

You may report sites that use spam techniques at: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
http://support.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

Keyword Density

Simple copy changes to the website can impact the way it is listed. If the copy is changed, words are added or removed the density for your targeted keywords will be affected. The keyword density is monitored as a  %, and the slightest alterations will affect to your search engine results. If you intend to make any major change to the website check them with your search engine optimisation agency first.

Code Changes

When your developers modify HTML source code, change layouts or tweak designs are they aware that this can affect the way search engine spiders interpret the content in the pages?  Meta Data changes, using different HTML tags and even the order in which items in the page are indexed may impact rankings.

Also changing file extensions or renaming pages would mean, as far as a search engine is concerned, they are not the pages they were previously, and hence the rankings will change, and may drop completely for a short period of time.
Linking

External links are a valuable source of traffic in their own right. Over the last year both external links and internal cross linking have also paid a major importance to the way your website ranks, therefore if your site has dropped, the simple answer could be that a link to your website was removed from a highly relevant external site, or the link has become incorrect become your renamed or removed some pages?

To view which websites link back to you, use the following command in the Google search box:

link: http://www.mysite.co.uk

Server Issues

Ranking will fluctuate depending on your server’s stability; whether you have an enterprise load balanced cluster or a shared hosting solution reliability is critical. For bigger businesses we always recommend a 24hr site monitoring service to make sure the website performance is never degraded, especially during deep crawls. Log reports and site statistics can also be monitored to ensure the server is reliable. Look for minimum uptime of 99.99% or more.

If the server is not functioning adequately or the website generates errors when a crawl is in progress, your site may be excluded from a search engine, or could output information that represents a security risk.

Summary

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. The three major search engines Google, MSN (new) and Yahoo! are all in competition with one another, in what has been named the ‘Search Engine War’ to index and rank the most appropriates sites and provide the most relevant results to users.

Search on these three engines, using the same keywords and the results are both similar and contrasting, this is because all three engines have their own spiders, which index pages, and use different algorithms to rank websites. Some pay a higher preference to inbound links, while others give higher preference to coding techniques and so on.

Any one of the above factors I’ve described can further compound differences between algorithmic search engines and contribute to overall changes in traffic and rankings. 

Long term – monitor the moving average and not the day to day trends. If your content is good, your search engine optimisation team operate within ethical guidelines and you have something relevant to offer the world, your website should maintain consistently good positions, which adds a some level of predictability to the algorithmic sector.

Andrew Thomas – Algorithmic Search Specialist
Neutralize (*\*)
Reaching new heights in search engine marketing.
http://www.neutralize.com