How Volatile Are Search Results? — Whiteboard Friday
Summary
So all of these daily changes, Google rolling out all of these tests that affect just a small percentage of SERPs, this is obviously going to cause a lot of fluctuation. If the results are very close in their ranking ability, then you could imagine that theyre going to go up or down a little bit in this period. A lot of whats been coming out is about how they might be using user data to inform search results. Now there have been experiments in the past, by people like Rand Fishkin, showing how you can affect real-time ranking changes using user data, as in if you ask everyone in a big room to go and click on position 2 or 3 on a SERP, then that result will move its way upwards, this kind of thing. So maybe some of this reactive data is filtering through and affecting SERPs in real-time.