Fluctuating Google rankings
If you’re an avid checker of your website’s search engine ranking positions (SERPs), you will have probably come across strange instances where your positions can change drastically from one day to the next. You might think there’s something wrong with your SEO or even Google, but it is much more likely down to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.
It is reported Google have somewhere in the region of 41 datacentres. At any time each datacentre will typically have a different number of pages cached for a particular website, meaning links from pages which haven’t been cached will not factor in Google’s algorithm. So depending on which datacentre is being used to return your results can lead to wildly fluctuating SERPs.
This is seen most regularly with new sites and sites which have recently undergone link building campaigns and other SEO work, as different datacentres will more than likely have different numbers of your website’s pages cached (and those of websites linking to your website).
Therefore I urge those of you seeing this kind of thing not to panic - simply check back in a couple of weeks when all the datacentres have caught up with each other.
RankPulse tracks the 5 month Ranking history for 1000 selected Keywords in Google. They also provide a RankPulse Index for the same 1000 Keywords. This index helps you to see when there are large fluctuations in the Google index.
This tool can be useful to explain fluctuations you are seeing in your own Rankings.
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