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There are many reasons why search rankings fluctuate. Read about why it happens and why it’s a good idea to focus on other metrics, too.
Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Arjun in West Bengal. Arjun asks:
“Why do rankings of certain keywords fluctuate a lot? For example, a particular keyword ranks 8 in the morning, 10 in the afternoon, 15 in the evening, 9 late at night. The keyword is searched from one location and one IP address only.”
I’ve been soothing client’s fears when they type in a query and see that their site has fallen for 21 years now.
There are many reasons why a site’s ranking will fluctuate – and in reality, in most cases, you won’t definitively know why the ranking changed.
But in many cases, you can make some pretty good assumptions when a keyword’s ranking drops.
You Don’t Weigh Yourself Every Day, Right?
Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows that it’s counterproductive to weigh yourself every day.
The same goes for search engine rankings.
If you check your rankings every day (or as is the case in the question at hand, multiple times per day) you aren’t going to see an accurate picture of how you are doing.
In fact, if you are checking rankings too often, you are going to be susceptible to knee-jerk reactions that may very well derail your overall SEO strategy.
My recommendation is to check your rankings a maximum of once per week.
Of course, there are reasons that some sites may want to check more, or less, often.
But for most sites, once per week will give you a good idea of how things are going and will allow you to see if your SEO efforts are truly working.
Rankings Fluctuate Due to Competition
The more competitive a query is, the more the sites ranking for that query will fluctuate.
When a query is competitive, Google is typically crawling the sites relevant for that query more often.
The players competing for rankings in that query are more than likely making frequent changes on their sites.
I’ve talked about “baby algorithms” in the past.
For many competitive queries, there are baby algorithms in place to rank the sites relevant to the topic.
When that happens, the rankings are going to move around a lot more.
In the original question, the poster seems to indicate that the fluctuations are consistent day after day.
My guess would be that this is an algorithm that is in flux.
Eventually, these rankings will settle and be more consistent, only changing periodically.
But while an update is happening, rankings change frequently.
Checking your rankings over and over during a rankings update is a bit like weighing yourself 10 times a day.
It might be interesting to you, but it won’t give you any indication of how much weight you are actually losing (or gaining).
