Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!
-
Hi SEOMOZ and it's USERs,
Been trying to find my answer online but now after three weeks of reading blogposts I'm going to try this.
My website was ranking really good on 10 important keywords but not so good on the long tail, between 11 - 50 on maybe 30 different other, not so important keywords.
So I began doing some work (I'm a newbie) but this is what I did:
1. Changed top navigation structure to get 4 other pages (w/ keywords as links) in it. (used a dropdown)
2. Wrote plenty of text that was a good fit for the page. (The text is OK and not to spammy looking.)
3. Added three links from high quality sites with keywords as links to these pages. I added them from my own site that is on the same server, same IP.I know, not looking so good.
4. Changed URL structure on a couple of pages to get a keyword in it. (did a correct 301)
5. Changed to better Titles and headings on the page. Keywords in them both but not the same.The result:
1. My 10 most important keywords I began ranking even better. I rank no. 1 on 9 out of 10.
2. Almost all the other pages went from ranking ~ 15 - 50 to not > 50.It has now been 4 weeks since I did most of the changes and 3 weeks since all the pages was hit > 50.
So now I'm thinking about what to do?
1. Should I clean up my text, titles so they don't look to over optimized?
2. Should I remove my links from my own pages? (my link profile in general is actually pretty good.)
3. or should I just wait? Because changing more will just indicate to Google that somehing fishy is going on?
In the beginning I hoped that Google killed my rankings just because of the big changes. But now after 3 weeks I'm more sceptical and thinks I've been hit by a over-optimizing filter.
According to webmaster tools I've not been hit by a manually penalty.
Please, help me. I would really appreciate all ideas from people here with more experience.
-
So it sounds to me that you really just need to focus on the SEO basics, don't do things that you know you're not supposed to do just to try to speed things up (like building a bad link profile) and focus on understanding who your audience is so you can create content that's better than "not too spammy". Remember, doing SEO stuff without a high regard to its correctness or its adherence to Google's webmaster guidelines gets a lot of newbies in trouble.
-
ok. Thanks for clarifying.
Of my top 10 important keywords that I rank no. 1, 7 of them are to my home page and 3 to other pages on my site.
-
By the second point, I meant: is it only your home page that ranks well (for all of those 10 high-ranking terms), or are any of your internal pages also ranking well?
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to get back.-
The pages were a couple of years old. But because of no On-page optimization they weren't ranking as good as I wanted them too.
If I look at my competitors, the top 10 pages are much worse in quality then mine. (Ok, I'm not unbiased)
-
Not sure if I understand this question. The important keywords that I rank really on are mostly ranking my homepage/front-page. But there are a few sub-pages that are ranking well on a couple of important keywords too.
-
According to SEOMOZ Keyword difficulty tool they are all about the same in difficulty. Between 30 - 40 %.
-
-
Eskil,
A couple of things I didn't get from your question that could help in providing an answer:
- How old were the pages that were not ranking as high as you think they should when you made the changes you described in your question?
- Are the keywords that are ranking well on pages besides the homepage?
- How competitive are the terms you are ranking well for and how competitive are the ones you are not ranking well for?
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
-
Semantically related keywords
How can i find the semantically related keywords to a certain topic ? id there a software that does this ? I am not takling about lai but semantically related keywords. tthank you,
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
I have one keyword which disappeared
My site currently ranks for over 2000 of which 92 are in the number 1 position. Im very active with this site. My Main keyword is a two word keyword ,I have never been below the position #30. Has always been at best 3rd and fourth page. I rank primarily for mostly 3 part keywords and 4 part keywords. However , I noticed about a month ago,The main keyword no longer showing up on serp tools .Moz included. At first i was getting wierd results using keyword tool .Not moz serp tool. I would get different result every time i checked it. When i tried to verify these results ,Only to find my site not at the projected page and rank. After more than a month now this particular keyword is no where in site. Im still getting traffic fom all the other keywords but im a bit confused over this. I thought my main keyword was about to be on the bottom of the 2nd page but instead seems to be completely gone.
Technical SEO | | Yellow20000 -
Keyword place in page HTML code? Higher is better?
Hello, is it important to place keyword more higher in html code Our situation: item page. H1 and all text about this item with keyword mentioned three times is in the end of html code? Competitors pages with info about item, but higher keyword place and description in html code make better in SERPS. Could it be reason? Could we change place of text about item in html code ? Giedrius, Lithuania
Technical SEO | | Patogupirkti0 -
Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?
We have thousands of pages we're trying to have de-indexed in Google for months now. They've all got . But they simply will not go away in the SERPs. Here is just one example.... http://bitly.com/VutCFiIf you search this URL in Google, you will see that it is indexed, yet it's had for many months. This is just one example for thousands of pages, that will not get de-indexed. Am I missing something here? Does it have to do with using content="none" instead of content="noindex, follow"? Any help is very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MadeLoud0 -
Nofollow links appear to be still included in SEOMOZ crawl and Google
I have added the nofollow tag to links throughout my site to hide duplicate content from Google but these pages are still being shown in my SEOMOZ crawl. I also fetched an example page with the Googlebot within Webmaster tools and it showed all nofollow links. An example is http://www.adventurepeaks.com/news All News tags have nofollow but each tag is appearing in my SEOMOZ crawl report as duplicate content. Any suggestions on whether this is a problem or if i have applied the tag incorrectly? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | adventure340 -
What if my brand name is my keyword?
Referencing the new 'over optimization' penalties.. What if your company name was "Buy a Burrito" and your website website was buyaburrito.com (not a real site), and your main keyphrase was "buy a burrito". Will Google treat all Branded Terms as exact or phrase match keywords and penalize you?
Technical SEO | | daviddischler0 -
Anyone having issues using Keyword Analysis and Rank tracking lately?
Seems it works once, maybe, then replies with a message that it can't complete the process when trying another keyword. _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
Domain name with separated/non-separated keywords
I start a new webshop within a month about spices and coffee. I'm thinking about the domain name to take. I would like to get visitors from coffee and spice keyword searches. How much does it matter (in terms of SEO) if I use spiceandcoffee instead of spice-and-coffee? (The site will be hungarian and it sounds easy to remember without the hypen: fuszer-es-kave or fuszereskave.) Does Google weighing more separated keywords in domain, instead of non-separated?
Technical SEO | | joo0