Online Traffic and Ranking Fluctuation: What Causes it?

Change is the inevitable truth of life and it applies to website traffic too. The rankings and traffic online keeps changing, but not because of search engines always. The fluctuation may be caused by a number of factors as given below:

Local vs. Global News and Information
It is not only the online factors, but the offsite factors too have a hand in the website positions getting affected. One such factor is the fact whether you have substantial amount of current news, incidents in your site as well as your offline marketing strategies.Basically traffic gets affected by the users buying behavior and interests. Similarly the latest sports, T.V, music, or weather industry news also contribute to a website's fluctuating rankings and positions.

The Highly competitive Web Site Market
Every other day, a new web site dealing in the same products or services as you shows up in search engines. It is a highly competitive arena and as new sites get indexed, old sites are removed and new ones added and amended. It is important that you employ ethical search engine optimization techniques and also keep an eye on the competitors' strategies and techniques being used so that you know what they are upto.

The Google Sandbox
Another reason for fluctuating website rankings and online traffic is the use of 'sandbox' by search engines like Google. It is believed by some web optimizers that Google uses 'sandbox' phenomenon where new or penalized websites are kept, thus not showing an accurate ranking of these websites in the SERPs. It is only when these websites come out of the sandbox (usually in between 3 to 6 months) before showing the right rankings and positions in the search results. And in case your site is pretty old, pull up your socks and renew it with fresh content for the search engines to spider and index. This is a known fact that regularly updated and reviewed sites are indexed more often than stale and old ones, and this makes a big difference to the rankings.

Trying a shortcut for rankings
Blaming the search engine algorithms for your site's fluctuating rankings is wrong when you yourself indulge in wrong and unethical practices to rank well and fast. Using unethical ways to reach higher rankings and earn more targeted traffic may work for some time, but in the long run, it is caught by the vigilant eyes of the search engine spiders. And when you are caught, the after effects are as bad as from getting penalized to getting banned.

Changing the keyword density
Even a small change, alteration, addition or deletion in the keyword density of your webpages can fluctuate and change the ranking and traffic of your site. So, before you decide to make changes in your keywords and phrases, do keep in mind SEO rankings and traffic in mind.

Fiddling with the code
Any changes or modifications in the HTML source code, layouts, designs can fluctuate the rankings and traffic of a web site. In fact even renaming pages, altering file extensions can adversely affect the rankings of a website.

Removal of links
We know how important linking is for websites to gain higher rankings and more targeted traffic in the search engines. One reason for change in your website ranking could be the removal of links to your website from some highly relevant website or irrelevance of the link as a result of your altering some pages.

Unreliable server
How stable is your server? This question is important because your ranking also depends upon the server's stability. The server needs to be not only efficient, but also reliable in terms of load time and functioning. If the server is not upto the mark, or creates errors while spidering, the site may be excluded from the search engines.

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