Have you ever wondered why the results for a certain query are always the same? Do you have a site ranking 5th for a major keyword and no matter what you do it just won’t move up to 4th?
We call this phenomenon Search Result Lockdown.
Basically the search results for popular keywords behave almost as if Google is just loading them from a cache (perhaps they are, it would save server load) and the cache is only updated once every so often. Thanks to the QDF algorithm getting to the top for fresh queries is quite easy at the moment but trying to break a well established search phrase can be nearly impossible.
My theory is that there is a certain amount of caching or intentional lockdown of the popular search results so that Google can tweak the algorithm without affecting the “money” phrases too much. They can build click data on the long tail results to test new systems while the main keywords show the normal high quality stable results.
Whatever the reason the end result is that sometimes search results don’t change for weeks and even months.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Interesting find Patrick. Have noticed this for a while and wrote about it over on the fire horse.
http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Search-Engine-Optimization/Running-into-Googles-Great-Wall-of-SERP-defense.html
Surely that should be
normal
high qualitystable results.This is a really great find. It’s really weird that Google is doing these kind of things the only people have web sites and blogs care. That’s why Google doesn’t care what we really think. They know that people just searching for information will go to Google. So they don’t have to worry about what we think.
This is true. I’ve got some site ranking on 6th position for main keyword and it took 5 months to go to 4th position. Pretty hard.
Tell me about it. Very Painful exercise, thus far clawing my way through the serps of dead (non fresh content) sites. Bouncing back and forth is painful.
it s always givin me viruses
Really interesting article. This is a big problem that I noticed too. The cache is a good explanation and I think the cache refresh time is a lot wider for the first pages (cache depends on how often that data is requested – so if the system load is higher for certain pages (usually the first 2-3, they cache the results for some time (months))).
that is a really interesting theory that you have come with Patrick. I see the same with some of my sites also.
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