SERPs drastically changing every hour

I understand that there is volatility in SERPs for a thousand different reasons, but lately I haven't been able to wrap my head around what I'm seeing for a couple keywords on one of my sites (5 months old).

I've been using RankTracker to monitor my position in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When I check my ranks I am not using a proxy, which should rule out SERPs changing as a result of localization.

What I'm seeing is my keyword rank in the 30s across all 3 search engines, then if I check it an hour later it has completely fallen off the top 100. An hour or two later it will return somewhere in the 30s again. The site is only getting updated about once every 2 days, so I wouldn't expect that anything I am doing onsite is shifting the positions. I put a freeze on backlinking for a couple days just to see if that made a difference and I still get the same results.

Is this normal behavior? I've read a lot of threads on similar topics but I haven't heard anything about positions changing on an hourly basis.

Yes they can vary a lot even throughout the day and no you really should not be checking that often. Seriously dude any more often than once a day is more than obsessive, spend that time getting some work done.

One thing to keep in mind is that your links matter when Google finds them not when you create them. Stopping your link building for a few days is really not going to make much difference, Google is still finding all those others you made over the last month.

Agreed that it's not the best use of time. My concern though is if I only check once a day or once every few days I'm not necessarily getting accurate results. If I'm appearing on page 3 50% of the day and not appearing anywhere the other 50% of the day then something just seems fishy.

Perhaps this is due to the site still being new and the drastic change in positions will calm down once the domain is older.

It just happens mate. I had a site I've been trying to rank for about 3 months for a really competitive keyword, it's been sitting for 2 months at #11 and jumped to #3 today only behind wikipedia and another major authority in the niche - they're unpredictable at best.

This happens a lot particularly if you've been doing aggressive link building.

Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast...of which we call Google..hahaha

yes it's normal because there are 7 servers per country and when you google dance , servers doesnt have the same ranking for your site

check this to get all the servers ranking for your site : http://www.positeo.com/check-position/

olimix said:

yes it's normal because there are 7 servers per country and when you google dance , servers doesnt have the same ranking for your site

Click to expand...

Thank you for this. I was browsing the settings in the RankTracker tool and found a setting for "Enable rotation of search engine data centers."

This is the reason I've been seeing different results. It also opened my eyes to the fact that not all users in the same geo location will get the same search results at any given time.