New Post Rose to Position 30 then Dropped Out of Top 100

[Jesse]

I'm doing a case study on a client site to do with game reviews. I wrote a new review (target page) about a specific game, and I've built a "mini net" around it with various related games linking to it, some of them link to each other as well. News articles and other related topics link into that "mini net" as well.

I initially had about 10-12 pages in the net as a whole with about 8 pointing directly to the target page, and each week since, I've added 5-8 pages to the foundation of this net as well as pointing 1-2 directly at the target page as well. The anchors are varied, and about 1/4-1/5 of them are exact match for specific keyword phrases we're targeting that include the game's title.

It's probably worth noting that all of these nodes in the "mini net" point to other related stuff that's not funneling up to the target page for this particular case study, and regular interlinking is something that's been established on this site for quite some time.

We entered the SERPs around position 70 for the two main keyword phrases and steadily rose for two weeks to around 30. From there, both dropped out of the top 100 completely a day apart.

After a couple of days, one of them played peekaboo up to around where it was before it dropped like what's shown above on February 17.

My understanding is that this is Google probably playing their Google games trying to get me to freak out and stop doing what I'm doing. My plan is to keep doing what I've been doing instead and wait it out.

Just wondering if I'm thinking about this correctly. Thanks.

 

[Ryuzaki]

This isn't abnormal at all. New pages can act like new sites, where they perform "better than they should" until some calculation gets done then they get pushed back down for a while. Then it's smooth sailing from there. If this problem is on-going the content either isn't up to par or the keywords are too competitive, or both.

The fact that it popped back to where it was is a good sign. That's likely the end destination after all this volatility. But since it happened only one day after the drop, it's also possible the rank tracker found it ranking when it's search connected to a different datacenter that hadn't dropped it in rankings yet. It takes time for Google's data to propagate across all its shards or whatever out there in the real world.

You said it's a "new" post but we don't really know how new. But probably new enough that when you're slamming it with all this relevancy and page rank through the internal linking that Google is ringing the alarm bell and wants to fake you out and see if you'll undo your work and out yourself as a spammer (like you mentioned). Just hold the course. If you're doing it right, it'll be fine.

 

[bernard]

It can also be that the intent for a keyword changed, so your high ranking was based on specific intent purpose and then it got changed and now you're back to where you would be without that intent boost.

It might be because your post has mixed intent and I guess that's more common for broader search terms, where Google is constantly reevaluating how many webshops, how many local, how many info, how many test, results they want on the first page.

I see this a lot.

 

[Jesse]

This isn't abnormal at all. New pages can act like new sites, where they perform "better than they should" until some calculation gets done then they get pushed back down for a while. Then it's smooth sailing from there. If this problem is on-going the content either isn't up to par or the keywords are too competitive, or both.

The fact that it popped back to where it was is a good sign. That's likely the end destination after all this volatility. But since it happened only one day after the drop, it's also possible the rank tracker found it ranking when it's search connected to a different datacenter that hadn't dropped it in rankings yet. It takes time for Google's data to propagate across all its shards or whatever out there in the real world.

You said it's a "new" post but we don't really know how new. But probably new enough that when you're slamming it with all this relevancy and page rank through the internal linking that Google is ringing the alarm bell and wants to fake you out and see if you'll undo your work and out yourself as a spammer (like you mentioned). Just hold the course. If you're doing it right, it'll be fine.

I appreciate the detailed response, and I’ll try to give some more information.

The post was up for 14-16 days before the drop. It’s for an online slot review. Typically, my client wants to focus on being first to publish on new games with a focus on the stream of new releases (as he should in the online slot space), but this was an atypical case when we were initially publishing about six months after all of the other top names already had their reviews up and aged. I chose this game’s review for this case study because it has proven to have much higher traffic than average for these games by about 1.5 orders of magnitude.

When I write similar reviews for new releases, we are typically top three for a while for the main keywords before sliding down to 5-10. I wanted to see what could be done internally to try to enter SERPs for a game that were already established.

In this case, I was targeting six phrases, all of which include the name of the game (the main being just the name of the game). The main two KWs and one of the others suffered this fate, but the remaining three have continued to hold position or edge upward.

Perhaps getting into the weeds here, but I went into it expecting it to take months to see anything interesting happen even just due to the issue of aging alone. When those keywords fell off of the face of the earth like they did, it was super interesting for me.

It can also be that the intent for a keyword changed, so your high ranking was based on specific intent purpose and then it got changed and now you're back to where you would be without that intent boost.

It might be because your post has mixed intent and I guess that's more common for broader search terms, where Google is constantly reevaluating how many webshops, how many local, how many info, how many test, results they want on the first page.

I see this a lot.

I don’t think it’s that because the intent is rock solid, but that’s really cool, and I’m glad you mentioned it. I find this kind of thing fascinating, and it’s a part of why I’m so drawn to trying to get into it full-time from the owner side.

 

[Jesse]

Just posting this in case someone comes across it wondering what happened. I'm seeing keywords bounce in and out again up and down the board for what I was targeting. All of the graphs look something like this now:

I'll add another graph a while later to see how it pans out.