What is affecting my rankings?

[troelskn]

Hi,

Long time reader, but my first post here.


I've been running a site since May and have had some initial traction with SEO, but I'm seeing a very strange pattern. Shortly after launch, we saw a rapid uptake in organic traffic until it suddenly dropped to nothing overnight. Then, after a couple of weeks, it returned and stayed for a couple of weeks before dropping again. This has repeated a couple of times, the last "up period" ended yesterday. The first few times around I found some errors that may have contributed to bad rankings, but I can't see anything wrong this time around.

Also - and this may be purely coincidental - both this and the previous "up period" was exactly 21 days.

This is our site traffic as it appears in GA:


Has anyone seen a similar pattern before and do you have any idea about what may be the cause?

I should add that we've done all the seo-101 and then some. The site performs well, has good on-page seo etc. We are an aggregator/search engine, so while I don't consider it spammy, we're probably in a grey area from Google's perspective.

 

[himanuzo]

There are many factors that influence the Google dancing.

Regularly add more backlinks. Quality over quantity.

Don't forget to build your own list. And also do targeted keywords diversification or diversity traffic methods (outside of Google) for preventing sudden income losing.

 

[MissioneR]

Back links would be the reason behind this drastic changes I hope. Between Google likes regular updates with the good backlinks as it is the backbone for the site to place in SERP.

 

[godspeed007]

Add backlinks from diverse platforms - Web 2.0s, bookmark, PBNs, PDF sharing sites etc etc

 

[MoeMoneyMoe Problems]

Google can be danceing a littlebit. The keyword you wan't to target can be rotating.
You need to monitor your keywords to get know if the reason is behind SERP changes or maybe because some keywords lost their traffic due to month period or something. There can be a lot of reasons - not only because of links.

 

[Poly Hossain]

Google has 200 factors that affect your web page rank, but luckily for all of us, there are 4 basic rules...

1. Trust: Search Engine Optimization has always a moving target. The search engines want to provide the best results possible, so they are constantly tweaking settings and adding functionality to make the results better. One of the biggest things they do is fight web spam.
2. Architecture: Imagine that Google is like a professor. Your professors in school required you to write papers a certain way. Your paper was graded on several factors.
3. Content: Content is the most valuable part of your website. Each of your main pages needs to have 2-3 paragraphs of unique content.
The second factor is words. You have to write unique new content for your website.
4. Votes: Incoming links act as votes for your web page. Search Engines take this into consideration when ranking your pages.
The third ranking factor is votes... also known as links. Every single link on your page is a vote for the page you are pointing to. This includes both internal links (links to other pages on your site) and external links (links to other websites).

 

[Stevoid]

Google can be danceing a littlebit. The keyword you wan't to target can be rotating.
You need to monitor your keywords to get know if the reason is behind SERP changes or maybe because some keywords lost their traffic due to month period or something. There can be a lot of reasons - not only because of links.

There is actually quite a bit more dancing nowadays than there was before (I believe the May update was the catalyst for all of this). Google seems to be "testing" new sites to see if they hold up, or change anything when their rankings plummet. The idea being that people doing things naturally (ie no SEO), won't even notice a rankings drop.

Just keep adding backlinks regularly as if nothing is happening... give it 30-60 days and you should see some stability!