Ranking question

[BenWells]

I noticed over the past month huge drops and gains on a certain keyword on my site. I had a closer look and noticed that two different pages are ranking for the same keyword. Page a is around 50th. Page b around the 200/300. Although page b is not targeting this keyword it is just related.

Over the past month the page a has been disappearing from my rankings then coming back a couple of days later.

Anyone have any idea what is going on here?

Here is a link to a picture of my ranking report

imageshack [DOT] com/a/img901/8726/QeZiFV.png

 

[intelligentppc]

How on earth do you get any traffic to a page ranking 50th??

 

[BenWells]

I don't, I am just curious to why this is happening.

 

[intelligentppc]

Ok. I've been working with Google since 2003. The one thing that has remained constant is how unpredictable their organic rankings are. That's how I get most of my PPC clients - businesses can not rely on Google's organic listings at all so they turn to PPC, which is what Google wants them to do anyway.

There does not seem to be much rhyme or reason, or warning, to the changes they regularly make to their algorithms. Which doesn't really help you except that you're not doing anything wrong from an SEO point of view necessarily.

 

[BenWells]

Thanks for your input. I have only been doing this over the past year and unpredictable and google seem to go hand in hand.

 

[intelligentppc]

haha yeah you will get used to that very quickly!

 

[StevePoster]

I noticed over the past month huge drops and gains on a certain keyword on my site. I had a closer look and noticed that two different pages are ranking for the same keyword. Page a is around 50th. Page b around the 200/300. Although page b is not targeting this keyword it is just related.
Over the past month the page a has been disappearing from my rankings then coming back a couple of days later.

Its not a surprised that the two different site pages are ranking for the same keyword because it is related so don't be shocked if there are other related keywords that are already ranking in the search results. The fluctuation in the search results is caused by their algorithms or your competitors are outranking your website in the results page.

 

[Codefixer]

I'd guess that Google is trying to decide which page is the most relevant for the keyword.

Try and strengthen the ranking signals for the page that you want returned for that particular keyword (both on site and off site, including internal links), and weaken the other page.

 

[Emily Lynch]

I too had a situation like this. I had seen a fluctuation to move from 200 to 20 in a single day. Then the other day, the results come back around 200th position. people say it as the Google dance but it has not been for a while.

 

[Ian J]

I'd guess that Google is trying to decide which page is the most relevant for the keyword.

Try and strengthen the ranking signals for the page that you want returned for that particular keyword (both on site and off site, including internal links), and weaken the other page.

That's how I fixed a similar problem on my site

 

[KostasPapahadjis]

You get so many online advertising options at a good price nowadays that you should not give too much attention on this. You can buy related traffic on bulk without breaking the bank. I was looking at bulk traffic purchasing a few weeks ago for a client. I ended up with rates like 100 Euro for 100,000 visitors. You don't get the same quality as with Google Adwords text ads, but the rates are lower-much lower.

 

[WhizzPeople]

This is called Keyword Cannibalization.

Here is a very old article from Rand Fiskin https://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Cheers!