SEO changes violently?

[Crazy_Teacher]

OK Interwebz, try this one. I work on the SEO for my company which has two domain names. Last Friday I was thrilled when I saw one of them had jumped from page four of Google to fourth place on page 1. All my work had finally paid off. Or had it?

Monday I was gutted to see all of them had disappeared and the other domain name was the only one to show up, but back on page 4.

Now it's Friday again and it is déjà vu! I woke up this morning to find the first domain name back up at page 1. What am I doing right/wrong?
@Josh: When I got to work the website was a mess. I cleaned up the description, added titles to the web pages (yes, they had no titles), reduced meta tags to under 500 characters. I have translated the site into 3 languages, added Web 2.0 (FB, Twitter, Flickr, SU, YouTube) with updates on those sites once a day to once a week. I have started making weekly press releases. I have gotten rid of all of the <H5> and made headers <H1> again, changed a lot of the text, and so on. Things like that. I will be curious to see if you think those are effective or just common sense...

[Jen Wiss]

This isn't uncommon. I'm not sure why Google does this exactly but it's 99.99% likely to be algorithmic changes (as oppose to manual changes) and it indicates that they are testing different ranking metrics and monitoring SERP quality as a result of the changed rankings.

The rise and fall is therefore highly unlikely to relate to anything specific that you did on your website, so don't be tempted to ramp up your SEO efforts or make any drastic changes in reaction.

Sometimes optimised sites briefly drop down the rankings and it's entirely possible Google does this to see if the domain suddenly gains a load of links because of the drop (bearing in mind Google is looking for natural growth, not SEO efforts). If the site does, clearly it is aggressively optimised indicating the links are probably bought. So suddenly ramping up your link building efforts in reaction, could have a negative impact.

Hope that helps!

[Josh]

I agree with Jen. But, I'm curious to what strategies you've adopted. I have seen our company jump from a solid 3rd page rank 7 national search (there for couple years) and within a month or two jump up to page 1 rank 4-7 (with fluctuation in-between) by doing a consistent article writing campaign. Been there ever since. So, I think if Google has found you to be an authority because of your efforts, you could find yourself in a solid position. If you're doing link building and on-site factors... I would be skeptical and chalk it up to algorithmic changes.