- Constant changes, which may involve a number of factors coinciding including data refreshes, different datacenters using different datasets and/or algos, filters being tweaked, knobs being turned up or down. These changes are seen several times a day, every day, for months now. Forget about personalizaton making it difficult to track rankings. The constant changes alone makes it difficult to track rankings.
- Pages suddenly becoming uncached, that have previously been cached for a long period of time; most recently, with pages that are a root of a subdirectory, such as mysection/, products/, etc.
- Different pages other than the "best match" being returned in the SERPs, usually with a much lower ranking. Looks like Google gets confused about which page should be returned. Normally, the best match page is returned at some level of expected ranking (usually high), but sometimes the best match page disappears from the SERPs, and some other page reappears, with a much lower ranking.
- Some rankings are on a cycle. People see rankings disappear on a Monday for example, only to return on a Wednesday or Thursday, disappear again the next Monday, reappear the next Wednesday, etc. on a constant basis. The days of the week here are examples only, and differ with each person. But for each person seeing this, the cycle is very predictable.
What have you been noticing? Anything to add to this list?
As regarding the 3rd and 4th points, Donna, a couple of questions?
3rd pt: are you saying a secondary page from a website shows. that is strange. If that were the case it would suggest G is ranking the site, not the page….and picking within the site. I’ve seen many commentators say that G ranks the page…not the site for a phrase.
4th pt. I’m behind the eight ball here…but I might be seeing this now. That would assume that the dc’s are in some sort of perpetual juggling with phrases and sites and aren’t settled as they had been for long stretches in the past. Could the calculations be too complicated to establish consistent rankings over a period of time?
Dave
As for the secondary page ranking, my guess is that Google is somehow forgetting something about the primary page. Like maybe G is using bad data on that page (not seeing all the links to the page momentarily or something like that).
No idea what’s going on with the juggling cycles.