We have often seen when adding a new page to Google’s index via Fetch and Submit that sometimes those pages rank very well initially, but then rankings drop and they never rank that well again.

It came up in a recent Google Webmaster Office Hours because someone was seeing their pages initially rank well but then they’d drop off over time as rankings were adjusting.  John Mueller from Google confirmed that this is what happens when a page is first indexed by Google.

Yes, it does adjust over time.  So, especially when it comes to new pages, we don’t have a lot of signals for these pages, so we start somewhere and then over time we figure out ‘oh it actually fits in a bit here.’

So that’s something that does change a bit over time.

So Fetch and Submit is a great way to get brand new pages indexed, but if you see those pages ranking well initially, especially when searching for them with super long tail keywords specific to the page, don’t expect they will retain those rankings permanently.