I know there may be no answer to this but let me briefly explain:

We own several websites that rank very well on Google and Yahoo. In fact, for some of our most important keywords we come up on page one and two.

However, one of our websites was ranking on the first page for a key term. This is an important keyword for us. When I go to google.com and search this we now come up on page two #13. We were #10 for some time on the first page. If I look at other datacenters, we come up #9 on most of them.

My question is:

1) Do most users see the results of google.com or some other datacenter? I was never quite clear on how this works.

Thanks for your help,
Scott

I think it depends a little on where you live. You might be getting results from one datacenter and I might be getting them from another because of any difference in our physical location.

If you're #13 you're not that far away from page 1. Why not work a little at picking up a few good links to put you back on page 1.

If you've toyed around with any of the page titles or heavily modified the content on a few pages (especially the major entry pages) it can make the site bounce around a bit - less so if you have good link popularity.

To answer your question:

1) It depends on where they're from, whether or not they use the Google toolbar, and which TLD they search on if they do use the toolbar. Google.com also covers a few different datacenters as well.

So...the fluctuation you're seeing is quite normal, and it also would appear that Google is in some state of flux right now. I personally would recommend doing nothing right now, at least until it settles down somewhat. If you're going to do anything, add useful and original content to your site and get it indexed and try to create more entry points. This will also help you with your inbound links to a small extent if you do it correctly, since inbound links affect individual pages, not sites.

But to give you an idea of the different datacenter effect and possibly of the flux, I personally see you at #4 under the phrase "make a website" and #21 under the phrase "build a website." You've probably seen something much different.

The ultimate acid test won't come from rankings anyway; they'll come from your site stats. If you see referral traffic for your keywords/phrases, they're working. If not, they aren't.

It depends upon the searched text search by the user from which country, industry domain. If your site contain relevent information or exact match with the search string. I hope i come first 3-5 search result.
Other thing is that you should be write meta tag for your site, they also enhance the search result ranking.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

To answer your question:

1) It depends on where they're from, whether or not they use the Google toolbar, and which TLD they search on if they do use the toolbar. Google.com also covers a few different datacenters as well.

So...the fluctuation you're seeing is quite normal, and it also would appear that Google is in some state of flux right now. I personally would recommend doing nothing right now, at least until it settles down somewhat. If you're going to do anything, add useful and original content to your site and get it indexed and try to create more entry points. This will also help you with your inbound links to a small extent if you do it correctly, since inbound links affect individual pages, not sites.

But to give you an idea of the different datacenter effect and possibly of the flux, I personally see you at #4 under the phrase "make a website" and #21 under the phrase "build a website." You've probably seen something much different.

The ultimate acid test won't come from rankings anyway; they'll come from your site stats. If you see referral traffic for your keywords/phrases, they're working. If not, they aren't.

Agreed, let me add that search engines change their algorithm all the time. These changes can effect your sites search engine position for the good or bad. Sometimes there is nothing that you didn't do or did wrong, it was just due to an internal algorithm change.