Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

One of the aspects of SEO that is most interesting is seeing how rankings change with time. Naturally, if you specialise in SEO, it is good to see that your rankings are improving with the changes that you make, however theoretically, there are three reasons why rankings would change. These are:

• You make changes on your site which make it more or less favourable with the current structure of the search engine algorithm.
• Your competitors make changes on their site which alters the results forcing a change in the rankings
• Algorithmic change in the search engine which re-ranks all sites according to different parameters

Any combination of the above is also a valid reason for changes in the rankings. However, in our experiment we chose to follow the rankings for twelve keywords over a period of fourteen days to see how the results changed with time.

The key phrases were chosen to reflect a diversity of what we believed to a cross-section of very competitive, competitive and less competitive phrases.  Single and double key phrases were also selected. The key phrases chosen were:

• Cheap Flights – very competitive
• Christmas Gifts – very competitive and seasonal
• Dog Kennels – competitive
• Black Circles – random sounding but competitive for tyres
• Politics – not really competitive in business
• PHP – not competitive in business terms
• SEO -very competitive
• Car Rental – very competitive
• Restaurant – competitive
• Toothpaste – competitive
• Stone Mason – less competitive, two words
• Dodecahedron – less competitive, one word

The difficulty is in choosing key phrases that will reflect the level of competition, inevitably there will be businesses that are targeting almost every key phrase.

To minimise the noise from the results, the same data centre, IP=66.249.91.103 was used. Results were also collected at the same time each day. To avoid any client side influence of any Google accounts or cookies, a clean installation of Opera 9.62 was used to take the results. The first page of results for each key phrase being saved to disc as an .mht file for later analysis.

Our broad expectation was that the results would show that for less competitive terms there would be less activity and for the most competitive, seasonal key phrases, the activity would be more frantic as competing companies jostle for the top positions. The results are being processed and will be reported in a later post.

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development