For large or com­plex web­sites, it’s not uncom­mon for key­word rank­ings to behave errat­i­cal­ly. Posi­tions can drop, switch, and hop between pages overnight.

This fre­quent­ly occurs when Google strug­gles to iden­ti­fy the most rel­e­vant page for a query, or when mul­ti­ple pages over­lap or com­pete with each oth­er for a spe­cif­ic top­ic. Your rank­ings fluc­tu­ate, and your con­tent under-per­forms — and often, you don’t even know that it’s hap­pen­ing.

This is called rank­ing flux, and it can be a tricky thing to spot, diag­nose, and resolve.

Spot­ting rank­ing flux and con­tent can­ni­bal­iza­tion.

Why is this a big deal?

When con­sumers search and vis­it your web­site, they often have a spe­cif­ic intent or ques­tion. When the page they reach doesn’t answer that ques­tion, vis­i­tors are more like­ly to leave, or to have poor expe­ri­ences — and poor expe­ri­ences mean lost rev­enue, and fur­ther rank­ing reduc­tions. When vis­i­tors nev­er see the land­ing page you craft­ed to meet their needs, every­body los­es out.

And so, ensur­ing that searchers find the best answer to their ques­tions and for their require­ments, quick­ly and with­out fric­tion, is often a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of a suc­cess­ful SEO strat­e­gy. Man­ag­ing rank­ing flux, and the issues which cause it, helps you pro­vide the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence to your vis­i­tors.

What causes ranking flux?

Similar content

It’s com­mon for web­sites to have pages which are about sim­i­lar or relat­ed top­ics, and for there to be over­lap on these in terms of rel­e­vant key­words and top­ics. Most of the time, that’s fine, and per­fect­ly nor­mal. How­ev­er, if you don’t put mea­sures in place to man­age how search engines infer which is the ‘pre­ferred’ page — if you don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate pages by intent, or don’t utilise tools like canon­i­cal tags — you risk expe­ri­enc­ing flux.

Change over time

When pages are moved or delet­ed, when con­tent is changed or updat­ed, and as com­peti­tors and mar­kets shift, your rank­ings can shift with them. With­out keep­ing a close eye on your con­tent, top­ics and site struc­ture, you can eas­i­ly get into a posi­tion where your pages are com­pet­ing for rel­e­van­cy and your rank­ings frag­ment as a result.

Complex ecosystems

If you have an inter­na­tion­al site tar­get­ing mul­ti­ple lan­guages or ter­ri­to­ries, a blog or con­tent area which is sep­a­rat­ed to your main prod­uct or ser­vice offer­ing, or if you’re part of a group of sim­i­lar web­sites, chances are that you may be suf­fer­ing from con­tent can­ni­bal­iza­tion, and expe­ri­enc­ing rank­ing flux. Your pages may be com­pet­ing with each oth­er as search engines strug­gle to under­stand the role and rel­e­vance of each based on user’s needs and con­text, and your rank­ings will suf­fer as a result.

What can I do about ranking flux?

Man­ag­ing rank­ing flux is all about plan­ning, vis­i­bil­i­ty and con­tent man­age­ment.

It starts by defin­ing a clear vision of which pages should be asso­ci­at­ed which top­ics, and then craft­ing the con­tent and pro­mo­tion accord­ing­ly.

Once you have a con­tent plan, you need to man­age per­for­mance and watch out for can­ni­bal­iza­tion. As mul­ti­ple key­words and pages com­pete, there are some tac­tics you can deploy to bring things back into line:

• Increase top­i­cal rel­e­vance: Improve the depth, breadth, and qual­i­ty of con­tent on your pre­ferred page, to make it obvi­ous­ly more rel­e­vant and use­ful to search­es than the oth­er, sim­i­lar pages.
• Audit con­tent: Ques­tion why you have oth­er sim­i­lar pages, or con­tent dis­cussing the same or close­ly relat­ed top­ics, and explore whether you can merge, redi­rect, or oth­er­wise un-clut­ter com­pet­ing pages.
• Can­on­iza­tion: When there’s a strong, strate­gic rea­son for sim­i­lar pages to exist, you can use canon­i­cal tags to indi­cate the ‘pri­ma­ry’ ver­sion, and con­sol­i­date val­ue and rel­e­vance.
• Man­age crawl and index­a­tion direc­tives: In some cas­es, you may wish to pre­vent Google from crawl­ing or index­ing com­pet­ing pages, using tools like robots.txt files or meta direc­tives.
• Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture: Con­sid­er your infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture — your nav­i­ga­tion, site struc­ture, and infor­ma­tion hier­ar­chy — and look for oppor­tu­ni­ties to alter how val­ue and link sig­nals flow through your pages.
• Exter­nal rel­e­vance sig­nals: Improve link, social and oth­er authority/relevance sig­nals to the pre­ferred page, to rein­force that it’s the opti­mal des­ti­na­tion for the top­ic in ques­tion.
• Hre­flang: For inter­na­tion­al sites with con­tent com­pet­ing cross-lan­guage and/or ter­ri­to­ry, use hre­flang tag­ging to explic­it­ly sign­post the rela­tion­ship between those pages, and keep things tidy.

And of course we’re biased, but Linkdex is designed to help you to man­age these sce­nar­ios — to iden­ti­fy where rank­ing flux is hap­pen­ing through struc­tured research and process­es, and to cre­ate and man­age tasks to get things cleaned up.

Check it out.