Anyone Else Noticing Rankings Jumping?

[shilly]

We have been bouncing back and forth between positions 4 and 5 for months for a broad term. Last week we went to 3 and between then and now we are bouncing between 3 and 7.
This isn't the strange part. the strange thing is, we are seeing different rankings within minutes of refreshing our browser and different ranking between IE and FF?
I have been asking others to test this as well with our term and site and they have noticed the same thing. We will be #5 in IE and #4 in FF, refresh a minute later and be #3 in IE and #7 in FF.

Anyone else seeing anything like this?

[lyj1968]

How old is your website? If your site is less than 1 year old, it is very common for the ranking jumping.

[brisbaneseo]

Yesterday I was in my living room on my laptop and saw my site was ranked number 2 for a clients keyword. Then I went into my office a few minutes later and it was ranked number 3 on that computer. The site is over a year old...

[metasynman]

It may be a byproduct of behavioral targeting. Your cookies are most likely different between FF & IE, depending on the sites you visit. Try logging out of Google & deleting cookies on both browsers and see if the "jumping" persists. I tend to use FF for all my surfing, and never log into anything in IE to keep cookies away. IE will then sometimes give me a more accurate picture of the SERP rankings of the average user since it's not associating me with my Google account.

But like lyj1968 pointed out, if the site is newer or experiencing a current boost to "buzz" from social media outlets or something, it's not all that uncommon to see the rankings jump around a bit... especially for newer sites.

[sseddon]

My site is 10 months old. I've been working hard on SEO since February. It was languishing on page 2/3 for about a month folllowing the work, then jumped to position 2 on page 1 for the key word AUDIO BOOKS. 24 hours later it returned to page 3. It has since bounced back and forth several times. It's driving me nuts!

Can I expect it to settle down?

[Marcosll]

Sometimes google will offer you slightly different results if you have searched for the same thing twice without following any links. It assumes you didn't like the first set of results and is varying them slightly.