How do sites manage to rank better with no fresh content

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, trying to work out why there are lots of sites that are ranking better than me. Our site www.in2town.co.uk has always been on the first page and for a long time we were number one in google for the term lifestyle magazine as well as being on the first page for other keywords.

Our site is www.in2town.co.uk

We had a site upgrade a few months ago and since then we have seen our rankings have dropped like a lead balloon.

I do not understand why sites such as the following seem to rank better than me for the word lifestyle magazine

http://www.lifestyle.org/

http://www.24sevenlifestyle.com/

http://www.lifestylesmagazine.com/website/

http://motabilitylifestyle.co.uk/

http://www.alifestylemagazine.com/

if anyone can help me understand what i am doing wrong and why my rankings have gone out of the window then it would be a huge help.

[ClaireH-184886]

just wanted to let everyone know that since the help i received yesterday we have noticed our rankings improved, we have gone from page nine to page six, so thank you everyone

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, i have now sorted out the www.in2town.co.uk and the in2town.co.uk and also the canonical tag, i hope i have done it right.

I am going to start a new post as i have come across a few problems since i have done this which includes the meta description not showing according to a seo tool even though i can see it.

many thanks for your help

[jesse-landry]

That will help with the duplication issues in a temporary fashion but redirecting is the only true way to solve the issue we're talking about here. Mainly because canonicals don't pass link juice so if any links are pointed to the non-www they won't carry through.

If I were you I'd avoid adding that line until after the redirect is done just because.

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you, will contact them now. can you let me know if this is what i should be putting in my head of my site to fix things or is this wrong

[jesse-landry]

Yes contact your hosting company. The process depends on whether they are running an Apache or IIS server. I'm sure they will know how to handle it for you.

Good luck!

[jesse-landry]

Excellent points Dana and I think you're absolutely partially correct. I strongly agree that there are a "whole lotta things all working together" that need to all be addressed. For sure!

As for the "how big of a deal is this redirect" discussion, I think it depends and differs case-by-case.

I also discovered this issue at the company I'm currently working at when I started there 8 months ago. I also discovered a ton of other weird issues related (like 2 index pages.. !?!?!) that I literally had to argue with the engineers over for days.. (They honestly believed we needed an index.htm and index.html page with identical content.. I think they still do even. ugh)

Anyway I FINALLY got them all redirected and we absolutely saw improvement. (Also, going from PR3 to PR4 is a big deal!! I'd throw a party for a PR bump!) We saw improvement in almost every one of our target keywords.

Here's why I think our cases differ: It all depends how the links were built prior. Meaning if you have links built to domain.com and to www.domain.com equally, the juice will be split between them and when that redirect happens your main domain will get a bump. This is what happened in our case and I knew it would going into it as I did a nice long scouring of our link profile prior.

So I'm guessing in your case they had all correctly built/gained links to the same version of the domain keeping it from being split.

Still it is my experience that when you get a link some people go domain.com and some go www.domain.com and in this case if the two are different you will definitely lose out on some great juice.

Nonetheless Dana, you are absolutely right that there is no end-all be-all in this business. (That's why we all love it so much, right?!) And it's also why I tried to stress that this person go through your list as well as heed my advice. Your list is much more thorough and a great launching pad for anyone looking into a similar issue.

Onwards!

[ClaireH-184886]

hi thanks for this. we sorted this out last time with the www. so i take it the person who done the upgrade did not sort it out this time around.

can you let me know the best way to sort this out, should i tell my hosting company or is it something that i can do. i will want to have the www. version. also what is the best way of putting the canonical in place. i was reading about it and it says i should be putting it in the head.

should i put this in my head position of my template, i am using joomla, i have seen there are a number of examples but which one would be right for my site.

would be great to learn how to sort this and thank you for letting me know what the problem is.

[danatanseo]

I agree with Jesse on the duplicate content issue. However, and maybe as a secondary question (that I would love to hear feedback on), does resolving the duplicate content issue from redirecting one version of a domain to another have any real measurable impact on a site's performance?

In my own experience, it doesn't.

Here's why I say this. Of course, I'm long-winded, so it involves a story... I came onboard at my current company in September 2011 as an in-house SEO. There was and still are a lot of technical SEO issues that haven't been resolved. However, some things we have successfully conquered. This "www" versus "non-www" was one of them. We hadn't redirected one to the other.  It's always exciting to find something you know is wrong and be able to fix it fairly easily and inexpensively. We fixed it...and? Absolutely nothing changed...Well, that's probably not accurate. After this change and several other technicals SEO fixes (i.e. making our canonical tags absolute instead of relative) our PageRank went from 3 to 4. That's it. Rankings didn't improve. Market share didn't improve. Traffic didn't improve. Conversions didn't improve. In fact, they all went the other way.

The only reason I bring this up is because I think there's this overwhelming desire that all we have to do is find that "one thing" that's dragging our site down, fix it, and boom, everything will be rainbows and unicorns. Should these things be fixed? Absolutely. Just don't expect that any one of them is going to show any kind of significant impact. Make a strategy, come up with tactics to support it, and pursue them with dogged determination. Chances are, your problem is never just one thing, but a whole lotta things that are all working together to drag your site down.

[jesse-landry]

Everything that Dana said is awesome. Look into it all. But before you do any of that, fix this huge problem:

Your site is duplicated. Very possible you have a panda problem on your hands if your rankings have tanked as you say.

You need to either pick the www version or the non-www version and redirect one to the other. This is the most vital thing you can do quickly and easily and is an absolute must.

You don't even have a canonical tag in there. (NOTE: You cannot fix this with just a canonical. You need to 301 redirect one to the other.) But right now google sees two separate sites. One at www.in2town.co.uk and the other at http://in2town.co.uk

Do this and then address what Dana handily listed out for you.

P.S. All of those sites outranking you have 301 redirects in place... This is huge you should heed my advice.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for the info, very interesting. I am looking at building some smaller sites on a subdomain name so may try this. many thanks for your help

[danatanseo]

Hi Tim,

I understand you frustration and it really could be so many things causing this that it's impossible to say for sure without digging in deeper. Here are some initial things I would say could be factors:

1. The very first thing I noticed is that every single one of the competing sites you mentioned has the word "lifestyle" in their URL." Two of them have "lifestyle" AND "magazine" somewhere in their URL. I find that interesting.
2. When you redesigned, did you change any or all of your URLs? If so, then it might be worth meticulously working your way through your 301 redirects and make sure they are all functioning properly.
3. Even if your 301s are fine (if your URLs changed), or even if you simply re-platformed, but kept your URLs the same, a drop in rankings and traffic after a big change like that is completely normal. I've seen drops of anywhere from 25-75% that lasted for anywhere from a few weeks to 6 months or more before beginning to recover.
4. While "fresh content" is most likely an element in Google's algorithm, it is only one of over 200 other elements and none of us know to what extent one element has more weight in effecting rankings than another. If you are competing against established sites, with a lot of social signals (i.e. customer reviews), inbound links, etc. it may not matter that they don't update their content very often. A great piece of content that isn't time-sensitive really doesn't need to (and probably shouldn't) be constantly updated.
5. It doesn't sound like you changed your domain when you redesigned the site, but if you did, this could firther complicate matters.

It might be worth an experiment to build a micro site on a domain that contains one or both of your keywords. Maybe target a specific niche or location and see how well it does. If it does great, link it back to your original site, if it bombs, you won't have harmed your existing asset. These are just thoughts.

You might also want to consider revisiting your keyword research and seeing if there are any opportunities that your competitors aren't leveraging. I bet there are some nuggets you'd get out of that exercise. Sorry, no definitive answers here, but hopefully some things to think about to help you strategize a solution. Cheers!

Dana