I noticed an engaging blog post from Stoney DeGeyter over at SearchEngineLand this evening (or rather, morning/afternoon for our American & European readers) - The Ranking Roller Coaster Cause & Effect. It's definitely worth a read, but I also wanted to point out one specific area that we see causing the "rollercoaster" effect all the time - temporal data.

Temporal data for a search engine can include:

  • When content was first spidered
  • When a new link was first discovered
  • Time frames for influxes of links
  • Time frames for large amounts of content on a specific subject

The engines can use this data in all sorts of ways (everything from knowing what to put in the "news" results to determining potential spammers), but it really affects the rollercoaster ups and downs of rankings, too. Stoney mentions three things that can cause the coaster:

  • Changes you make on your site
  • Changes to search engine algorithms
  • Changes made by your competitors

I'd add temporal fluctuations as a critical fourth. In a way, this falls under "changes to search engine algorithms," but the algos aren't really changing, they're just absorbing new data in the ways they always have. What we usually see is that Google and MSN, and Yahoo! to a slightly lesser extent, give priority to new documents on trusted sites and to even small clusters of inbound link influxes. Thus, the following scenarios happen quite a bit:

  • You're ranking great, when all of a sudden, a Flickr page or a Technorati tag page or a page at Wikipedia overtakes you. The page is new, has little to no external inbounds, and you're flumoxed by how it can rank well. Don't worry, amigo - that's almost certainly the fresh boost, and it tends to die out after 5-10 days at most.
  • You're ranking in 10th or 20th place behind some heavy hitters, but your domain is pretty tough and all of a sudden, 5-10 new links point your way. Voila! You're at the top of the results, ranking in front of pages you were sure you'd never overtake this quickly. Once again, it's fresh boost, giving a little bit of "extra credit" to your newfound popularity. I liken this to the search engines almost making the assumption that "whoa! this page got a lot of link love quickly, it must be super relevant/popular for this query, let's give it some juice." The problem is when the engines don't find lots more new links, you start falling down in the results fairly rapidly. Should we call that the "stale drop"?
  • Rollercoaster mania hits - you're trading places atop the SERPs with 2-3 pages almost every day. I almost want to call this the "tie" flux - new links, and possibly refreshed content on your page and your competitors is making it a really tough call for 1st place, so the tiniest of changes can bump you ahead or leave you behind.

All in all, I like Stoney's post, particularly for his last few lines of advice:

Almost every site owner will, at one time or another, find themselves face to face with significant ranking drops. Panicking should be the last thing that you do. Sometimes the best course of action is nothing, however you can never go wrong with a bit of research.

Many people, when seeing sudden drops in rankings, make drastic changes in their website in order to compensate. For the most part, this is a bad move. The first thing you need to do is to research the issue, identify what (as much as can be determined) caused the problem and then carefully plan out a course of action, if any, which needs to be taken.

However, make sure you're thinking carefully about temporal data the engines use and how it might be impacting your rankings/results.