The best way to make sure your site is not crawled is by blocking all bots in the robots.txt file. Make sure it is placed in the www. root directory of your server.

Simply aded user agent: * and disallow: / – your entire directory.

This is how I would do it anyway.

Seems my site is rather stable at the moment on 1st page.

I’d like to ask a quick question if I may, I’m trying to NOT have a test (as to avoid duplicate content penalization since I’m merely changing design and layout not content ) site of mines be crawled by any bots, is the sure fire way to achieve this is to not have a robot.txt file?

Regards and thanks for your time giving your valuable answers,
James

I find the ups and downs stop as your site ages and you get a larger link profile. Just keep building links and pages consistently, look for high value partnerships, I know they say reciprocal links don’t work but if you can get some really high value reciprocal links these can go a long way to stabalising your position.

Wild fluctuations usually occur when you are actively building links, Googlefinds links now very quickly and drops your rank in order to establish the validaty of the links. A drop in rankings usually comes down to a few things;

- Competitors have done some heavy link building

- You have lost some links

- Google has discounted some of your links

Hope this helps a little.

I found this really informative because of course I’m experiencing this roller coaster google ride right now.

Have you a checklist of things to do that bring a consistent plan of action to stabilize rankings ?

1- check any changes made to site (include low quality backlink / link check for your site, and all back link checks)
2- analyze the competition

In your opinion are there common things that cause the following:

a) a wild fluctuation
b) a drop in rankings, but no big fluctuation

Thanks for your time,

#13 really? To be honest my rank fluctuates between 9 – 15, a bit of a pain but at least were moving in the right direction, 6 months ago seowizz did not exist, now we rank hundreds of keywords on the first page of Google. The best thing about it is that I firmly believe anyone can get these sort of results, the first page of Google is not for a select few who know magic, a bit of hard work and consistency and it’s yours for the taking.

Thanks for the comment, hope to catch you around in the future.

Based on the “proof is in the pudding” ranking you hold (I am impressed) I’m going to bookmark your blog and keep reading. It’s refreshing to read someone that can actually do what they say. steve booth