serp tango

[pokaff]

Hello,

I read somewhere (who knows where as he posts so much) Randy saying that he had one url jumping back and forth for one keyword, between something like 5th position and 70th position back & forth.

So I have a keyword and it goes 5th, 45th, 5th,...Obviously I did not do anything to make it move.

Can someone please tell me if
(1) this is quite common
(2) is there an explanation?

ty

[Unknown Webmaster]

I saw something like that recently.

The domain looked like this xxxxpoker.com and I were optimising it for "xxxx poker". There weren't a lot of competition, but a couple of decent sized sites had a page for "xxxx poker".

My site went straight to the #1 spot when it first got indexed, and then dropped to something like #20 the next day. It has since taken a couple of significant jumps that was somewhat related to updates on the site.

[Randy]

It's pretty doggone common, especially with newer sites or pages. My site settled around #70 unfortunately, but maybe it'll come back someday.

[kingcobra]

Sometimes you can get a short term tease from Google although 5 to 70 is a pretty big range If you can get to 5 in that big of a KW then this speaks loudly for your SEO talents Randy even if it was only a short stay

That blurb about KW density was interesting by the way and I do look at density pretty closely but it`s true you do need to look at the strings as well as the particular words. The strings consecutively are important of course and this needs to be paid attention to closely. As far as the instances of the word or strings vs. the density I do believe that density is more important than implied in this article but not as much as a lot of people think and my recent test with losing my footer links which I use as a way of manipulating KW distribution among other things was a real eye opener here as there really was nowhere near the drop I expected from messing around with this big time. What I really came away with was an appreciation of the extreme value of the up front stuff like url. title, and description which I did understand was extremely important but as it turns out even more important than I even realized. The other thing is that the weighting from top to bottom is bigger than I thought as well which is very heavily top weighted.