Why is it That My Rankings Change?
I get asked this question [quite a bit|a lot}. I will answer it in the two different environments in which it is most often asked.
The first environment is one where a new client is in the middle of a rank building project. The process we use places backlinks, or pointers, telling the World Wide Web that a site is significant for a certain keyword term or phrase. The search engines rank them based on keyword ranking. The pointers are placed at a rate of about 3-5 a day during the first month or so and then increase the drip rate during the next couple of months to get a term to rise in the search engine ranking.
When the search engines see the pointers, they re-index the rankings for that word. Their job is to always provide the most relevant term for their customers and one of the main ways they do that calculation is by counting all the naturally placed pointers to a site that contain that word or phrase. The places that we set the pointers (article directories, blogs, web 2.0 sites) are constantly being indexed by the search engines to have their content indexed and counted.
The search engines do their part by accumulating the counts and then they make sure that the links are legitimate and not just a setup to try to fool them. They start this process following the allowance of the links to accumulate to a certain point (no one knows exactly what that point is) but then go through a sorting process that has the count changing constantly over a couple of month basis. They also read the page that the pointer is leading them to in order to be sure that the term really is relevant for that page and website – very cool.
The rankings are not changing every second (I will explain that below) but the rankings are being adjusted constantly throughout the process. That is why when you find your ranking for a keyword on a Monday and it is X, it could be X plus or minus 5-10 spots on Friday. This is common as the search engines go through this process. Their process works well and almost always provides the results that are the most relevant for their customers. It is rare that they completely miss the mark when you put in a term – kudos to them!
The second environment that I get asked this question is a little more frustrating for our customers. Often when I sit in my office and tell a customer they are ranking X for a term they challenge me and tell me they are ranking Y for that term. We are, however, both correct. In order to allow their customers to get a fast response to all the queries we are asking from the search engines, the search engines have broken the internet grid into a large network of servers that each carry a large portion of the queries and hits on them. There are thousands of data centers in the U.S. alone managing their data. They go through a process of updating that I understand takes between 17 and twenty-three days to get all of them refreshed and consistent. The issue we face is that, since the time frame of updates is rather long, the rankings are different depending upon what part of the country you are in, what time of day it is and what the current load of requests are for your area. Occasionally, when a certain area is getting a large load, they will run your query from a different data center and you will get a different result that you just asked for a few minutes ago!
Hope this helps answer a question many have wondered about. Don’t hesitate to call if you have any problems or inquiries about your current rankings. Remember, this is a process.
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Free Keyword Research - Why Do You Need to Do Keyword Research?
Main lecture theatre by derfel_ie.