Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?

[imageworks-261290]

Hello,

I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it.

I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites.

I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article.

Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?

[imageworks-261290]

thanks very much. Heavily agreed upon with those social shares. Very hard to get those however!

[ak1lz]

As long as you wrote the article first, Google will know! It won't penalize you bcz people stole it.

A suggestion for the URL:blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html

I would change this to: blog/marketing-budget-for-your-smb/index.html

I would keep the article title the same!

[ak1lz]

Also, try and get more social shares! I noticed your competitors articles got tweeted almost 100 times! These social signal will help you.

[ak1lz]

I am currently showing you in position #9 for that term. I took your content, did a word count and counted how many times 'marketing budget' was used. in the article you used it 8 times within a 969 word article. Your big competitor (INC) used the term 5 times inside a 1,162 word article. #1 position is INC.com followed by, Microsoft, About, Wiki.. These are all big players in the Google rankings and hard to compete with.

Due to the nature and competition of this keyword I am not going to suggest re writing.. I would setup a few more pages, with similar content about marketing budgets.. maybe not only for small businesses but for big ones, maybe tone down the use of the keyword, add some variations to it! Make about 2-3 new articles like this.

Track these new articles. They should have different titles, number & variations of keywords, URL's. Take note on which performs better than the others. After some time has passed.. take your better article and make those subtle changes to your article. Maybe change up some of the keywords, improve the URL and maybe put your keyword closer to the beginning of your page title.

(I do not want you to make these changes to your current article yet). I am not sure how it will affect it's ranking.

When you get your articles tracked and they start to improve on rankings, go ahead and link to your already ranking article from the new ones.

Hopefully over time you will be able to get back into the top 3!

[imageworks-261290]

http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html

its up to number 7. We updated it in April of this year to bring it current and added some new changes. This post BTW has been featured in a NYT best selling business book.

[imageworks-261290]

its not a rewrite by the way. It's the original article. wondering if OTHERS that have rewritten it could be one of the reasons

[imageworks-261290]

marketing budget

we used to rank 3-5 on this term, got many of our visitors from it. It still ranks number one for setting a marketing budget.

Here is the link

http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html

[ak1lz]

A rewrite wouldn't be a bad Idea, being that it is from two years ago. Are the websites that out rank you have fresh content? Google likes fresh and this could be a reason why you dropped. If you could screen shot the article and upload it to imgur.com or just provide me a URL I would like to look at the piece of content, maybe I can give you a reasonable cause as to why it dropped.. also a search term would be nice too!