Freshness Index?
-
Hi, I've been a member for a few months but this is my first entry.
I typically build small portal websites to help attract more customers for small business approx. 5-7 pages and very tightly optimized around one primary keyword and 2 secondaries. These are typically very low competition. I do no link building to speak of. I don't keyword stuff or use poorly written content. I know that may be subjective but I believe the content I am using is genuinely useful to the reader.
What I have noticed recently is the sites get ranked quite well to begin with e.g. anywhere from the bottom half of the first page to page 2-3 and they stick for maybe 2-3 weeks, and the client is very happy, they then just vanish. It's not just the Google dance either these sites don't typically come back at all or when they do they are 100+ I was advised this was due to the freshness index but honestly these sites are hardly newsworthy...just wondering if anyone had any ideas?
Many thanks in advance.
-
It's typical for new websites, i have few case's that new website on low competition keywords rank very well for few weeks and then boom! Can't see them in first 100. Bonus at the start
I would do some basic link building, few directories(only high quality), few links from social network and it should help. This can also help you: http://www.seomoz.org/directories
-
Thanks for your reply William, much appreciated.
I do use Word Press but have the option to remove meta which I always do, so there is no page date identification. Interesting you mention pages as opposed to posts, I will definitely try this, thanks again.
-
Congrats on your first post!
As you titled this post, freshness is indeed very important. I am assuming you are using a CMS like WordPress, and if you are using these articles as 'Posts' then freshness/ranking could vary. However, it might be more worth to have them as 'Pages' instead.
This is just if you are using WordPress.
Overall, my advice is to make sure your articles are static pages with no date identification. But if you plan on always posting fresh content, putting dates on them could be helpful as long as you post often.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google only indexing the top 2/3 of my page?
HI, I have a page that is about 5000 lines of code total. I was having difficulty figuring out why the addition of a lot of targeted, quality content to the bottom of the pages was not helping with rankings. Then, when fetching as Google, I noticed that only about 3300 lines were getting indexed for some reason. So naturally, that content wasn't going to have any effect if Google in not seeing it. Has anyone seen this before? Thoughts on what may be happening? I'm not seeing any errors begin thrown by the page....and I'm not aware of a limit of lines of code Google will crawl. Pages load under 5 seconds so loading speed shouldn't be the issue. Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yandl1 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
Website Ranks and gets de indexed ??
Hi My website is almost 3-4 months old . Whats strange is that as soon as it get Crawled it ranks for few terms for 1-2 days and all of a sudden gets de Indexed for these same terms or Rank drops like drops from page 5 to page 10 . Nothing shows up in Webmater tools under Manual Action . Assuming its a Algorithmic penalty, How to deal with this kind of stuff. Should I stop working on this site all together ? Or assuming its a New website, google does not want it to rank for medium or high volume keywords ? What keywords I am after have 300 -2k searches per month .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Defining Canonical First and Later No Indexing
We found some repetitive pages on site which has mostly sort or filter parameters, tried lot to remove them but nothing much improvement Is it correct way that:- a) We are creating new pages altogther of that section and putting up rel canonical tag from old ones to new ones b) Now, after canonical declared, we will noindex the old pages Is it a correct way to let new pages supercede the old pages with new pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Meta No INDEX and Robots - Optimizing Crawl Budget
Hi, Sometime ago, a few thousand pages got into Google's index - they were "product pop up" pages, exact duplicates of the actual product page but a "quick view". So I deleted them via GWT and also put in a Meta No Index on these pop up overlays to stop them being indexed and causing dupe content issues. They are no longer within the index as far as I can see, i do a site:www.mydomain.com/ajax and nothing appears - So can I block these off now with robots.txt to optimize my crawl budget? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Duplicate Content From Indexing of non- File Extension Page
Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension. so they indexed www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's www.samplepage.com/page.html How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension? I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler0