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
-
Pages Fighting Over Keywords
Hi Guys, Just after some general advice. Since manipulation of keywords through links is no longer a feasible way of ranking these days, I was wondering how people got round the issue of pages bouncing for the same keyword or Google deciding that a blog post is a better signal rather than your service page. For instance if you are doing local and national search, how do you stop the local keywords ranking for national pages, without diluting the local signals. I have some ideas:- stronger internal linking to the page review content But obviously redirects or canonical won't be a good solution as I still want these pages to exist in their own right. Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Reserved characters in Keywords
A lot of my keywords have + signs in them which causes lots of problems in urls and feeds For example S355G10+M. What is the best way to put this in a url S355G10M S355G10-M S355G10_M Thanks
Technical SEO | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
What is the best way of inserting keywords into a social networking site
We have a social networking site called Yookos (www.yookos.com). As per the norm, many of the pages of the site carry user generated content and can only be accessed by the users themselves. i created a keyword list that our technical person the uploaded onto the site but SEOmoz shows that these keywords cannot be picked up.
Technical SEO | | seoworx123
What is the best way to make sure that our site is also picked up via search engine searches.0 -
What are the factor effect on keyword postion?
The factor of error in Onpage process or Link building process effect on key word position.
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Keyword cooccurence
Is there any truth to keyword cooccurence being a ranking factor in google or any other search engines. Meaning that they not only look at the words you are targeting but the other words on the page to see if those words have a close relationship to the main theme ( the words being supposedly targeted) I heard that keyword coocurrence does not scale well over the billions of pages that are on the internet however, some waterdowned approached of keyword cooccurence is possible. what do you guys think?
Technical SEO | | mickey110 -
We have been hit with the "Doorway Page" Penalty - fixed the issue - Got MSG that will still do not meet guidelines.
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
Technical SEO | | LVH
My site's URL (web address) is:www.recoveryconnection.org
Description (including timeline of any changes made): We were hit with the Doorway Pages penalty on 5/26/11. We have a team of copywriters, and a fast-working dev dept., so we were able to correct what we thought the problem was, "targeting one-keyword per page" and thin content. (according to Google) Plan of action: To consolidate "like" keywords/content onto pages that were getting the most traffic and 404d the pages with the thin content and that were targeting singular keywords per page. We submitted a board approved reconsideration request on 6/8/11 and received the 2nd message (below) on 6/16/11. ***NOTE:The site was originally designed by the OLD marketing team who was let go, and we are the NEW team trying to clean up their mess. We are now resorting to going through Google's general guidelines page. Help would be appreciated. Below is the message we received back. Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.recoveryconnection.org/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Any help is welcome. Thanks0 -
Grr . . . Just can't seem to get there
mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?
Technical SEO | | kayweb0 -
What is the best top menu linking structure (for SEO) for my site: A or B?
I don't know if these two scenarios are any different as far as SEO is concerned, but I wanted to ask to get an opinion. On my website: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com you can see there is a top menu with "About" "Info" "Questions" etc. Some of these links lead to further pages that are essentially a indeces for multiple further links. My question is: in terms of SEO, is it better to A) have all links (that are now on the pages that the menu links lead to) displayed in a drop down menu directly from the top menu (and bypassing an intermediate page) or B) to have it as it is now where you have to click to an intermediate page (like "rain chain info") to get access to the links (and not have such a large drop down menu) Is there a difference in terms of SEO? In terms of useability it almost seems like a toss up between the two, so if there were better SEO value to one of the other, then I would choose that one. By the way, I know that the way it is structured now is strange, where there is only one drop down that leads to the same page as the top menu item, but that will be fixed, fyi. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0