Google Yo-Yo Effect

Once again, my hands have been so tied up in the past couple of weeks that I found myself either too tired or too busy to touch this blog. One of the things that got me so engaged was the weird fluctuation in the ranking for one of my company’s sites. After doing some research on SEO forums and blogs, I’ve learned a brand new term coined for this unknown phenomenon - Google Yo-Yo effect.

So what’s this Google Yo-Yo effect? Well, basically, I’ve been witnessing some consistent intra-day fluctuation in the ranking for one of my company’s most important sites. The site has been redesigned, switched back and forth between a couple of domains and finally underwent some SEO fixes a couple of months ago, lost the ranking for the old, less important keywords, but finally gained some grounds for the newly targeted keyword.

Although it still hasn’t made it back to the top 3 spots consistently and permanently, it has, however, regained some of the link juices and PR back from the old days. This site should have no problem ranking on the first page, or even in the top 3 spots once the on-page stuff is fixed as the domain has aged and possessed a PR7 (was PR8 prior to the recent Google tool bar updates). It has over 1300 inbound links including ones from a few other company sites that also possess PR7 and PR8.

So what’s the problem here? Well, I have been checking its ranking on a few specific data centres using proxy for awhile since I live in Toronto, and to my amusement, I’ve been seeing intra-day fluctuation that would make many people lose some sleep. Similar to many other sites that have been affected by this Google yo-yo thingy, our site would rank #7 in the morning, charge up to #3 in the afternoon, drop to #20 in the evening, and then shoot back to #5 at night.

So far I have yet to come up with a reason for this; I could only blame it on the relaunch in recent months that brought along numerous redirects, keyword switches, page re-designs, etc. The results could also be inaccurate due to the data centre IPs routing to other data centres.

Do you have similar problems with your site? Share your observations with me in the comment section below.

Ironically, the Google store does actually sell flashing yo-yo for two bucks and eighty cents. :p