Do Google SERP changes still work in monthly / 6 week cycles?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Do Google SERP changes still work in monthly / 6 week cycles?

irldonalb

10:15 am on Sep 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi All,

I was surprised to see the Google SERP Changes threads are still going.

From my experience Google are tweaking their results several times a week. I ran a test over the past 5 weeks on 3 big phrases. Our ranking fluctuated between 3rd and 25th position. And it’s not just our site; there’s no consistency except for maybe the first 2-3 results.

From this and other tests I’ve come to the following conclusions:

Results for Major Phrase (Over 5 million sites competing) constantly fluctuate however large shifts take place in cycles
Level 2 phrases change all the time
Results for Time sensitive / topical phrases don’t wait for the cycles. Take the results for “Sarah Palin” for example.

I don’t know what peoples thoughts are no this.

Donal

tedster

2:56 pm on Sep 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

Google stopped working in monthly update cycles at the time of the Big Daddy changeover in early 2006. According to recent information from several top Google staff, the algo now gets tweaked more than once a day - plus there are many others variations in the SERPs:

1) different data centers
2) geo-located results
3) various experiments served to just a few users
4) variations by browser
5) personalized results when logged into any Google account

Your observation about time-related variations are also accurate. There are differences by season of the year, day of the week and hour of the day. There is different handling of very "bursty" query terms.

It all means that we cannot really say "This url ranks an number do-and-so" with any degree of confidence.