Yo-Yo Search Results Experiment & Rankings
September 29th, 2006 by Jason Roe. Post is filed under Business, Marketing, Web Design & Development.
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Over the last week I have been doing an SEO experiment. I have been Piggy backing on the funda Dublin coastal development exposure. This all started last Saturday when I made a post about the video that was produced by funda. Around the same time I had swapped over to my new template. When you look at the template code itself you may notice that it’s not just a new style sheet it’s a whole new template.
The experiment itself was simple, take the keywords that I was receiving from the first post and apply it to a second post to get maximum exposure. The first post that was made on Saturday was ranking well on the SERPS by Monday. When I say ranking well, the post wasn’t #1 in any way shape or form but it did show up in the top #10.
The second post was made on Monday and included some (but not all) of the keywords that I had seen. If I had to do it all over again the title would have been more like “Funda Ireland launch, Wasaki Dublin Coastal Development“?. I noticed redcardinal targeting the term “Funda Ireland“? so it probably wouldn’t have been as much fun to target that second term.
On Tuesday the first post had dropped from the SERPS and was replaced by lots of traffic from irishblogs.ie. I can only guess that this was a mixture of me adding other posts “New Template!“?, “RateMyGoat Gets Smutty!“? and the second experimental post getting added. This was the first Yo-Yo that I had seen. The second post was ranking well on Wednesday / Thursday (I was ranking #1 for the targeted term). Domain age & linkbacks helped me achieve this speedy result. The influx of searches also got me some direct link-backs from forums and the like.
Today (Friday) I had noticed something strange. The second post had completely dropped from the SERPS. The weird thing is the post had been #2 for the targeted term this morning (8 am) and then suddenly vanished. This was the second Yo-Yo that I had seen. The only thing that had changed in the post was the comments made by my readers (this may have changed the keyword density slightly). I’m sure there where many other factors in play however these where the most noteworthy. The page seems to be fighting to get back in, dropping and appearing at what seems to be random intervals. I’m sure that after this post gets indexed the second post will completely drop from the SERPS.
Before you ask the targeted term was “dublin coastal development“?.
I would be interested to find out if anyone else has seen this kind of yo-yo with their blog within the last week?
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September 29th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
a part of your yo-yo effect is down to the number of links in to the story - with planet journals probably being your most valuable link in. given how long it takes planet to update that main page, you were probably in it for a while. then you weren’t, which caused your ranking to fall the next time google read the planet journals page.
September 29th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
The Funda.ie website is live but a little underwhelming.
I now have the #1 and #2 for ‘funda ireland’
September 29th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
try typing http://funda.ie
September 29th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Curiously they must be working on it now because it was resolving earlier
October 1st, 2006 at 7:40 am
[...] [Edit - Jason Roe has also been blogging about Funda and the Dublin Coastal Development and has conducted one or two experiments to rank for related key phrases.] If you like this post please share it! [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:10 am
Their site is once again off air.
On the plus side they have regained the #1 and #2 spot for their own name.
I think the changes in the SERPs are a good example of Google biasing recency (with new blog posts getting high rankings) and diminishing value of that bias over time as the same posts become more stale (those posts subsequently dropping in the SERPs).
Nice experiment all the same and porbably of interest to any SEM tageting keywords based on current affairs/trends.
April 2nd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
This is true as it happens with many of my sites