Why no one can guarantee top rankings

Beware, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google or any other Search Engine for any search term. No one can even guarantee that your target keywords will get a top ten listing in any major Search Engine, never mind Google. Below ten reasons why there is not such a thing as guaranteed SEO:

1. Search Engines change algorithms regularly

Search Engines are notorious for changing algorithms used to determine and display their result listings. Google makes over 400 changes per year to their algorithms. Changes to Search Engines can severely affect your site’s ranking almost overnight – positive and negative.

2.You are not in control of SEO elements

Ranking Listings will always fluctuate and are never permanent because you or your SEO company will never be in control of all elements affecting Search Engine Optimisation.

3.Your competitors optimise too

Competing websites might target the same search terms (keywords) with their own SEO campaign. This will affect your ranking, how much will depend on your competitors’ relative to your effort.

4. Rankings depend on your preferences

Your rankings will depend whether Search Engine users are logged in or not and how they have set their search preferences. For example when you log-in to your Google account all the search results will be customised to your history and will be different to when you log-out.

5. Different data centres show different results

Search Engines use different local data centres, which will show different rankings in different regions for the same search terms and same websites. Results for Google places will also vary depending on your search and search location.

6. Your website content matters

Even small changes to your content, especially page titles can adversely affect rankings over time. Uncontrolled uploading of content to your website can cause loss of relevancy, keyword dilution and changes to the keyword significance Search Engines allocated to your site. 

7. Your website age matters

New websites are more likely to fluctuate in ranking than mature websites because of the age of indexed content, relevancy and the lower keyword significance.

8. Some websites just have more clout than your site

Popular social media sites or dominant news sites might publish articles with the same keyword focus as your site. Because these sites have a large number of indexed pages and are indexed hourly you might find your site loosing rankings as soon as a relevant article is published

9. Sustained link building is vital

Spam links, infrequent link building, high volume link building activity followed by no activity at all will all make your search results less stable. Poor link building strategy will cause your rankings to fluctuate substantially.

10. Keep your site up and running

Frequent website downtime and pages that can’t be found will over time form a picture of unreliability in Search Engine’s indices. Search engines don’t like unreliable sites. Site access-, load time and technical problems will result in adverse and fluctuating rankings. Make sure you choose a good hosting provider and check all your links on your website to avoid 404s, 403s and other crawl errors.

There are a lot of other elements impacting your rankings such as age of your domain name and age of your content. For this reason alone never throw away your existing content and never launch a new website without proper redirection of your old pages. If in doubt, consult your SEO company.