If you work in SEO, or marketing, or just own a website and obsessively check your rankings, you will have suffered the pain of having your rankings change.  I have seen sales people who make money solely on the basis of keeping rankings, and get stressed every time that these rankings change.

This change in rankings doesn’t surprise me any more.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! And Bing all have a need to keep their rankings as up to date as possible, which means that rankings will change.  When I take a look at any of the clients that I monitor the rankings for, I see that the rankings go down – and up, sometimes quite dramatically.

There are many reasons for this, and as an SEO dude, I don’t have control over most of them.  Here are a few interesting ones:

• -Google trying out a new algorithm for a search.  Before rolling out a new algorithm fully, they do tests on searches.  They also have slightly different algorithms for different niches because people looking for information on deep sea oil drilling are looking for different things than finding out about the latest antics of Britney Spears.
• -Google testing different results in the pages.  There are all kinds of factors which Google tests with new layouts and ways of ranking sites.  They have fantastic levels of measurements on what sites people click on, and for a search engine, just having sites in order is not enough, they need sites which people actually want to click on and look at, so they have contact improvements, tests and changes.
• -There may be some breaking news in whatever niche you are in, so that new thing has been given temporary priority in order to keep the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) fresh.  If you are breaking that news – GREAT!  It can mean that you get that boost.
• -Other companies may be making a big push on getting rankings, which is something that we look at when dealing with a market, and other than regular ongoing marketing, we can only act upon retrospectively after a big change in rankings.  Bear in mind, that for all the sites that you gain rankings on, you will have pushed someone off the list, meaning that some of them will be wanting to push back.

A bit of history on Google rankings

A few years ago, the rankings on Google stayed the same for about 4-6 weeks at a time, then they did a big indexing run, and basically looked at the whole Internet, and re-indexed everything, then ranked it again.

Now Google has got a lot more resources, and is constantly scanning the Internet, and changing rankings almost in real-time.  One side effect of this is that blogs become a great marketing tool as they are recognised by the Search Engines as being places where people put a load of up to date news, and get added to the index quite quickly.

Now, if you were to do a rankings check every day (Not a good idea unless you want to get your IP address banned), you will probably find that your rankings change in small ways daily.  For all the ones that you lose out on because your rankings have dropped, think of the rankings that you have gained rankings because of all kinds of fluctuations.

The fact that you have been at the top of the rankings at some point means that the search engines think that you are of that quality, so it won’t be much work to get there again.

So, take a chill pill, stop worrying, just keep plugging away, and you will get there.

Cheers,

Alan.