SEO Question: Is It Normal For Search Rankings To Fluctuate Daily?
My rankings seem to move up and down on a daily basis. Is this normal? Many of my competitors appear to be much more stable than my site is in SERPs?
Deeho Says:
The way Google works means that there will always be movements in your rankings. This is because all over the world google has many server centres. Each on of these has thousands of servers, holding a version of Google web index.
However, each server centre updates at different times, so they don’t mirror each other, but have the same core information, drawn using the same algorithms.
When someone does a search, that request is routed through the nearest data centre with available capacity, so even though you search from the same place, your request might be handled by a different server using a slightly different set of data.
In the course of the average month, Google will visit all of its indexed sites at least once. They will then move up or down depending on the information obtained from that visit.
This also means that at different times of the month, your site might have been spidered, but the sites near your in SERPs might be due a visit and be ranking on month old information.
Additionally, Google has a series of backup servers so that if one fails, that hub will use older data (from the back up) until the new replacement server has re-spidered it’s data set again and updated ranking data.
These three factors mean that when you search or run a ranking report, you may be requesting slightly different data to the previous search, which will then show as a drop or rise in your results.
It’s only natural for mid ranked sites to fluctuate in SERPs. Once you achieve a solid top ranking, where the trust and authority metrics between sites tend to be larger you will gain stability in the results and appear in the same position on most if not all Google servers.
More Frequently Asked SEO Questions