Hard Lessons Learned... What's yours?
-
So I got a whole lot of help these past two weeks and my rankings have been skyrocketing. Then I decided to start working on the on-page SEO in the lowest category of meaning, specifically on long-tail URLs. So I shortened a few of my best keyword pages so they can be fully indexed...
Let's just say that I neglected to remember I had built over 2 years some 30+ PR4-6 links to these pages. Rankings for these keywords dropped from 1-2 US listings to non-existent.
Lesson Learned. But I'm still smirking
What was your big lesson/mistake in the past week?
-
That's a good one! One of my clients did that too on a regular basis. After we found the tag they got over 500 new pages ranking very high, and of course we were credited with the improvement, so that was a nice thank you check
-
I'll bet you won't do that again
-
I'll bet you won't do that again
-
Bumbed!!
We uploaded over 150 new product pages, and after 2 weeks Google had still not indexed them. After a few hours of trying to figure it out, all the new pages had a canonical link to the parent page (it used the parent page template)
We removed the canonical tag, but we are still waiting!
Reminder to self: Check all technical stuffs when publishing new pages!
-
_Ha ha ,.. nice to know that you have lost the rankings .. but still there is way to recover by doing 301 redirect .. yeah I can remember the day when I did a horrible mistake. I changed all the files from html to php. And when I rank report, I realized that I have done a wonderful thing. Not a single page was in first 10 pages of Google. What was a remarkable achievement. _
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
-
Are there any hard rules about internal linking of homepage?
Hi all, Usually we link homepage from all pages. That's definitely a boost for homepage to rank well. Do we need to interlink homepage to the highest? Including links from subdomains or sub directories. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Creating a new website, but I'd like to control it under a different domain.
I'd like to control it under the domain of another website with a higher DA. Can I create the new website (website A) and do an immediate re-direct to another website (website B)? Or would I be better at putting it as a subdomain? Such as www.websitea.websiteb.com? Cheers all, Rhys
Web Design | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Can't Hyperlink After the WP 4.0 Update?
Anyone else who runs a WP site have problems hyperlinking after the 4.0 update? I read I could deactivate all my plugins, and go through them one-by-one, but before I go to that step, I want to know if there's either an easier way to regain this functionality or if there is a specific plugin that's known to cause the problem. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Changing URL's for a website redesign
Hi folks, We're redesigning our website and looking for some advice on how changing our URL's would affected our rankings. If the page URLs are changing how can we carry out redirects to avoid losing any SEO rank? Thanks, Ross
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Critique a site I'm working on please
Hi guys, I have a list of things to do on this website that is longer than my arm but thought I would gather a few more thoughts on the site before moving on further with it. The site is here. It went live a couple of days ago for live testing. I have a news section coming very soon at theworkplacedepot.co.uk/news - it is in live testing now. One glaring issue for me is that some of the products simply aren't "buyable". What I mean by that is that the options are too vague and too vast - as an outsider I wouldnt have a clue what I was buying! Other issues: The banner at the bottom of the HP is a test - its design will be changing. The sitemap has some issues and will be addressed. There is no area yet to "log-in". However, critique for me pretty please! 🙂
Web Design | | MattJanaway0 -
What's the best way to sculpt links on a page?
I know PR isn't a top ranking factor anymore, so "PR sculpting" isn't something to focus on. But isn't it still true that having more links that you need on any given page is worse than having fewer, in terms of that page's authority? I'm managing a site that has a lot of navigational links in the footer, which are duplicative because they're almost all included in the top nav bar, and several are triplicated in the sidebar as well. I wanted to remove 85% of these duplicative links from the footer, thinking they diluted the page authority and that most users probably won't scroll there anyway when we launch the site. The site owner is pushing back, though, not wanting to remove so many links because he believes they might be useful to some users. We can test our respective user-behavior theories after launching, but right now I have two questions: Will having a sizable number of duplicative links in the footer dilute the page's authority? and 2) Are there any other ways to reduce this dilution, aside from simply removing the links? (I know nofollow is not the answer, but possibly using iframes or Java or something like that?)
Web Design | | KyleJB0 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0