A very common question that I am asked on a very regular basis.
My quick response is “Why should your Google rankings stay the same?”
As Google and the other major search engines add more and more sophistication to their algorithms in their quest to deliver the ‘most relevant’ results, there are many factors fighting against consistent listings. Lets just look at a few of the major ones:-
1. Time – the web is constantly changing, news is constantly updated, sites are updated. The online competition for a search term changes hour by hour. All content isn’t equal, a breaking news item might only rank for a very short time period, a highly trusted page has a lot more permanence.
2. Location – Different countries – different search engines. Even within a country, the major search engines increasingly try to supply ‘local’ results where possible. A search for a ‘decorator’ can give different results depending upon your location.
3. Data Centres – to deliver the very high level of response we expect, Google has many data centres serving search results. These are not all updated at the same time and so will often give slightly different results. This is often why if you repeat a search within a couple of minutes, you sometimes see changes in the listing.
4. Personalisation – whether you log in to Google or not, some use is made of your recent browsing history to provide relevant results. So two people at the same location at the same time might see different results.
…and there are plenty of other factors which dynamically contribute to a site’s search ranking for a particular keyword, and lead to inconsistency.
So what’s the moral :
1. If you want to track rankings, look for trends rather than absolutes. Rankings, like people’s weight, vary hour by hour.
2. Remember higher rankings are ONLY significant if they generate more targeted traffic to your site. Being Number 1 for a phrase nobody ever uses is pure flattery, and contributes nothing to the business’ bottom line.
