Dropped 50 places for Page Title Change
-
Hey Guys,
I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50.
After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will.
I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending.
I changed the title;
from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"
to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"
This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do.
I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1?
Thanks,
Adam
-
Just wondering how you are making out with this. I checked Google US and didn't see you rank in the top 50. Curious to hear an update. Hope its going well.
-
What do think about the large amount of words in the image alt tags? I am just curious. I cant help but think it may look a bit spammy. Am I wrong?
-
I think that's it then! Ha that is a weight of my mind, now I have a reason I can create a solution. I just checked my Webmaster Tools data and we went from a stable level of 3000 impressions on the 24th July going straight down to 1000 impressions by the 28th July then picking up slightly and staying around the 1600 level ever since.
I checked the Panda update and they said ~1% have been affected but I've got a lot of duplicate page data on there. I'm going to push forward with a complete change to the text on the front page. Ahh that is a weight off knowing what the problem probably is. Whew....
Thanks for all the help guys its really really appreciated.
Adam
-
There have been several Panda updates since then. There was one on July 24th, 2012 so it's possible that this update picked up your potential Panda issues.
-
Bear in mind theres been alot of recent Google algo changes, your rankings may have changed because of something other than page titles.
BTW - I say that especially applies to the travel industry - ive seen alot of flux for aggregators of late.
-
Ahh I hadnt thought of that, the drop though was about shortly after I changed the title and requested a google reindex of the site. I wonder if the changes caused Google to push through a re-evaluation and penalised it based on the Panda update.
The Panda update was in Fed and my changes we the 19th July, so pretty far apart, but could still be linked.... hmm...
-
I'm guessing this is not really connected to your title change. On what date did you drop from the SERPS? Is it concidental with a known Panda Update?
The reason I am asking is that a quick look for duplicate content on your site, shows this: Google search for a phrase from the site in quotes : 2530 results!
If Google thinks your page is a duplicate of others out there then it has no reason to offer it up to searchers.
I didn't have a thorough look though, but I'm thinking that the drop is not directly related to your title change.
-
Yeah I might at that, just the fact that I'm not in the top 50 though is a very bad sign for the rest of my plan ....
-
Try to continue with your plan I think Google doesn't have an "undo" button... When I'm optimizing the title I'm also changing the meta description to suit the new title, that way if Google doesn't find an appropriate part of text for the description, it will use the optimized one.
-
With this though its over a couple of months with multiple sources of confirmation. My total organic traffic in GA dropped 20% about a week after the change and my Webmaster tools impressions have halved as well.
Right now checking in multiple sources I'm not even in the top 50 since making a title change and then reversing which is very worrying...
-
I know changing the Alt tags and other on-page optimisation was part of my original plan. Change title, stabilise, change h1 tags, stabilise, change alt tags etc..
Unfortunately the title change bombed my placement, so before I make some more changes I'm trying to start from my initial position and move forward.
Just dont seem to be able to get back to before I set my plan in motion.
-
You need to remember that SEOmoz is constantly changing their ranking algorithm, just like Google is, I think that they have a place to track changes.
-
I lost rank on a product page for too many of the same type keywords. I scaled them back and ranking improved a few weeks later. A program I use indicated this :Your Image Alt attributes seem very long . The average wordcount per Alt tag is 8.8 . Possibly too high.
-
Thanks Leat, I know its odd. I think I've been penalized for spam like behaviour when I changed the title. I'm a little concerned as America is the main source of traffic.
-
Europe, Romania
-
Can i ask you where you are based?
-
I did a manual check and your website is ranking on the 10th position for the search "bahamas all inclusive" on google.com.
Your title in the search is "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation..."
Update: I've searched through an US proxy and the website is not even in top 50...strange!
-
Ahh no I'm not after that. I know the rank has dropped and I have had this confirmed in multiple places including webmaster tools and google analytics.
So the rank has dropped.
I need to increase the position for those keywords.
Adam
-
I would try rankchecker it spiders out to find your actual rank. Or Google the keywords and find your sites current rank. I believe SeoMoz does an update kind of like Semrush but not positive.
-
SEOMoz with Google US as the preferred search engine. Not too bothered about the others for now, as I'm hoping they'll fall in to place.... hopefully....
-
Can I ask what you are you using for your rank check?
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
-
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Author Byline in Page Title in SERP
I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick? We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it? Thanks in advance for any insights! Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high csvmF
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Why one of my top pages dropped?
Hello here. Our website, virtualsheetmusic.com, is pretty popular in the sheet music realm, and we used to rank on the first page for the keyword "violin sheet music" until a few weeks ago with our violin dedicated page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html But a couple of weeks ago we dropped to over the 5th page on Google (I can't even find us!) and I have no idea why. Most of our top ranking pages are still there though. This never happened before, after 17 years on the web. Do you have any idea why that could have happened?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
SITEMAP - Does <changefreq>and <image:title>have any apreciable effect?</image:title></changefreq>
Hi everyone. It was hard to find some actual evidence that some of the atributes to be declared in a sitemap have some real impact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Particularly, im interested in these two: <changefreq></changefreq> and**image:title</image:title>** I've used them in a few cases just to check their effect and couldnt see any.
Do you have any experience with these? Or any other atribute that might be helpful, in order to create a more accurate and effective sitemap? Also, this could be a great topic to create a new Moz Blog post, the one about sitemap is 8years old.0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
YouTube Page
Hi All, I am new here but already I can see that SEOmoz is a great place for SEO 🙂 I need advice... We have one client that have 100.000 views per day on their YouTube channel! Now they have about 15.000 per day and ask us what we can do with SEO for their YouTube channel. Thanks for help! All The Best, Sanel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FighterSpirit0 -
301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
Hi, This is a new one to me ?! I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages. Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on? The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s? I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet) Any help would be appreciated. Kind Regards Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thephoenix250