I know what you’re thinking 3 posts in 3 days, Tim you must have nothing better to do. Well not exactly, I have a few reasons for posting this on a weekend which is out of sync with my usual blogging activity.
Reason 1 – I want to talk about this before it leaves my mind
Reason 2 – It is a question people ask me frequently
Reason 3 – (the most important) I have been working 70 – 80 hour weeks for the last few months. I am taking myself away tomorrow for a relaxing couple of days and I don’t intend on blogging until late next week, don’t cry 
Even though I am going away my laptop goes everywhere with me so still keep you’re SEO questions and comments flowing.
Ok enough small talk, let’s get to the real reason you came to read this post.
Every webmaster who is actively trying to rank better in Google will have experienced Google’s up and down mechanism, let me explain. You target a keyword, you hit first page… yippee!!! 2 weeks later ahhh I have dropped 5 pages??? How did this happen?? Am I being punished???
Calm down, all will be revealed. There are a number of reasons why your site is moving up and down all the time and it has nothing to do with your site being punished or sandboxed by Google.
It could be
- Competition – What you think your competition aren’t actively optimising?? Big mistake.
- It could also be that other, authority sites have published an article using the keywords you’re targeting. They will leap frog you due to Google’s freshness factor. This does not last long, so don’t worry.
- It could also be the fact that you are bleeding links, this is common amongst bloggers who use a lot of guest posts. Their links get less and less powerful as they move down the blogging archive from the front page.
Having said all this there is another more common reason for your ranking fluctuations and that is the consistency at which you build links.
If you build 320 links back to your site one week and none the week after, how do you think this is going to look to Google?? They are going to think either you have bought a load of links, or that you got lucky with some viral content.
Everyone goes on and on about viral content and how it is great for building links, this may be true, you can acquire a lot of links, however the kind of links Google wants to see are those that are acquired naturally over time, not get them all in one week and no one links to the page again.
Think about it logically for a second, your rankings are jumping all over the place… Do your link building activities look something like this??
Do you think if your link growth looked more like this your rankings would be a little more stable??
I know what I think..
Right so what does all this mean, I take it your reading this article because your actively trying to promote your site on Google?? If this is the case you are no doubt actively building links?
Right, whatever channel you are using, which should be multiple channels by the way, which ever your using do it consistently.
If you’re writing articles, set a weekly target and stick to it. May be increase it a little every month. If you’re submitting to directories again set a target number each week and keep it consistent.
I know what you’re thinking, if a site consistently builds the same amount of links every week this does not indicate growth?? This is bad, right??
Well it is if your’re missing out the most important aspect of link building and that is creating a user friendly site stuffed with quality content. This kind of link building will act as your natural growth metric.
I am not preaching here as I am guilty of cramming a load of work in over the weekend, but when I have consistently built links the results have been 5 times more stable.
If you cannot commit to building links each week and have to do it in little bulks here and there, don’t worry too much, you will simply have to wait longer for your rankings to settle. Once your link popularity is at a solid level, the up and down ranking problems will settle down by themselves.
Well as always I hope you got something from this. I’ll see you all next week, I’ll be thinking of you whilst I am sat by a pool in a 5 star hotel or chilling in the suite, hey I need this
Have a good weekend.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Great…very informative post…thanks for sharing…
@Peter,
Thank you and thanks for reading and commenting
Excellent post, this one of the most common question you come across from you bosses why we are not on first page any more for this term?
Hi Tahir,
Thanks a lot, it is a common experience especially for newer domains.
This is defo a common thing. A lot of people go a little mental when Google does their little dance although I have seen a lot of other weird things going on. I had a particular site that ranked really well for a number of keywords. Suddenly one of the keywords was outed from the index and all other remained. I am pretty sure its google putting a dampener on that keyword because it had too many external links with that exact anchor text pointing at it.
The only thing I would disagree with slightly (and have done with other people in the industry) is that Google looks negatively on too many links being built in to quick a time. If you think of blogs or any site that has news worthy stories, they can get thousands of links in days for the right story. This may happen again and again, I am not sure Google will actively try to isolate these cases with a site who may be mass link building …
Anyhow, I have waffled enough !!
Hi Searchbrat,
Thanks for your detailed comment, much appreciated.
With regards to the ‘bulk links’, I don’t necessarily mean Google does not like them, I just feel from experience that Google favours a site more that has a continuing and even increasing flow of links coming to the page. I have had a few articles on here go viral, one was about bing SEO, it went to the top of Google for that keyword for the first few weeks of the Bing release, however as links started to slow down so did the rankings. I currently sit in 5th as it gradually drops. I also compete for the keyword ‘google seo’ I was one the first page for about 4 weeks in 7th, I am now at the top of the second page due to some viral articles about Google caffeine but I guarantee I’ll return to my position when links stop flowing to these viral articles. Google is on a search for fresh, relevant content, what better way to assess freshness by looking at how many links a page is continually generating.
One way Google can discern between buying link or spam and viral links is that the majority of viral links are targeted at a deep page of a site, not the TLD. Just my thought process.
What are you trying to do though? Understand the number of links means little. I have given one of my clients a PR5 site with 2,000 incoming links. One of my sites is a PR4 with under 400 links.If you’re trying to increase your status within the organic search results get rid of the idea you need 100k links and instead replace it with 100 high quality links. Even at 100 quality links you’ll do a lot better than with 100,000 spammy links.Really a nice & informative post.Thanks for sharing this post with us.Really a nice post.
A nice article full of common sense.
Thanks for this post
@notjusttaps,
Thanks for the comment
Frequency is a big part of a link building strategy,I have noticed that steady link building activty helps a lot with Google especially. Thanks for the post.
I dont think the timescale has much to do with things but quality def is a big part it, great post!