Why are my Google Results Yo Yoing around?

Have you found that your site has been yoyo-ing up and down the Search Engine Results Pages recently? Been knocked off the top spot by a site that doesn’t seem to be anything like the quality you would normally expect of a site that Google has placed so high?

Well if so, you’re not alone. Webmaster world has an interesting, if brief thread about the number of sites appearing at the top of the SERPS that are blatantly using spammy, borderline black hat SEO methods, linking schemes and bulk purchases of low quality links. It seems to be a trend that is Google wide. Even in our own professions we’ve seen a number of results that really don’t seem to belong at the top.

Some may blame the original Panda release and others may blame a more recent update that at least one SEO blog writer suspects was targeted at links. Either way we’d hope that it’s a temporary situation that Google is working on.

While it has been a source of frustration to many Search Engine Optimisers over the past year, the Panda update has made a huge difference to the quality of the SERPs these days so it seems to be just a case of taking the rough with the shmoove until Google can figure out how it wants to prioritise back links in the Ranking algorithm.

Backlinks can form a valuable part of your website’s profile, but in many ways they are too easily “Punked” by unscrupulous webmasters who want quick wins and to saturate search with the online equivalent of those nasty dayglo posters you find illegally pasted on underpass walls.

There are alternatives but few that are immune to this kind of action, and to make the search algorithm only look at the on-page metrics would be completely out of the question. One of the best things about Google’s method is that its intention was always to find a fair way to rank websites, applying only on-page metrics would mean that the ranking factors and the decision as to what is ‘Good’ would be determined by humans; Outside of Stephen Fry I don’t think there is a single human being that I would ever give that responsibility.