Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
-
Hi all,
I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down
This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered.
So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed.
I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam?
Many thanks in advance for all your help.
-
I think part of the problem you're seeing Michael is due to Google's preference for fresh content. It's more prevalent in some industries but I have noticed the rankings boost you get from it is temporary. It degrades over time.
-
Hi Michael,
Glad to see you got help!
If you're happy with the responses, would you mind marking this question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, I'll give it some time and as you say look at my site and try to figure out why one is ranking and the other is not.
thanks again
-
Hi Michael,
Then I would guess you want to be optimising for something like "Inspirational quotes from Edmund Hilary" or "Inspirational quotes from Albert Einstein"? There is a much bigger discussion to be had here that could reach more people.
Perhaps give the page some time and see if there are opportunities to create some internal links. Look at the stats from your other page and see why this is ranking, but the new one isn't. I am sure if you performed a mini audit, you would see lots of options that could help with this.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Many thanks for replying, really appreciate it.
That's a fair comment - I must admit that we thought we had enough content in there, but maybe not by the sounds of things. This page - http://www.getinspired365.com/genius - which is an old style page and been around for a few years - seems to rank 3rd in Google when you type in that quote (Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered) but this has even less content than our new style pages and is also not optimised in any way. Having said that, we can certainly try to add more content to the page to see if that helps things.
And yes that makes complete sense. So the purpose of this page is for people to find the quote (and be inspired by it in some way - although this quote isn't the best!), and then find out some additional information about the person that said the quote, and also have links to more Edmund Hillary quotes, and links to other inspiring people. So it's not meant to be spammy in any way - certainly not our intention. Our intention is to provide people interesting quotes, in a visually nice way whilst being able to learn a little bit more about that author. Optimise wise we try and optimise on the quote itself, as that is the focus for us and what we are about. We'll try and add more content and see if that makes any difference.
Many thanks
-
Hi Gaston,
That's really helpful. Thanks.
The new pages are only around 2 weeks old - the ones that have appeared then dropped. The ones that still appear ranked are a few years old. So I guess we could know more in 3-4 weeks to see what our true position is.
I will have a read of those three links you've sent to me and see if there's anything that applies to us/could be affecting us. Many thanks for your reply.
-
Hi Michael,
The first thing I would say, is that the page is somewhat lacking in actual content. There are only 168 words on there and this to me would suggest a thin page in Google's eyes.
You then have to ask yourself, who am I trying to attract to the page and what do I offer them when they get there? Do I answer a question in enough detail that Google is going to rank me well for it?
Is the page about Mountaineering or Edmund Hilary? What is the purpose of the page? What phrase are are you trying to optimize for?
I hope this makes sense?
-Andy
-
Hi,
How old are the pages that you are tracking? Have you considered that SERPs will fluctuate for a few weeks since google indexed them?
Also, you should take into consideration that January has been a really windy month in the SERPs, that's because there have been many updates on the Google Algorithm.
Check them out here:
Google Algorithm Change History - Moz.com
Algaroo.com
Mozcast.comYou should also take consideration, as you've said, that your pages aren't optimized over SEO.
I'd recommend you that learn about the major updates that have been over january and analize wether your site may be not suitable for google to rank you better.Hope it helps.
GR
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
-
Local SEO - ranking the same page for multiple locations
Hi everyone, I am aware that issue of local SEO has been approached numerous times, but the situation that I'm dealing with is slightly different, so I'd love to receive your expert advice. I'm running the website of a property management company which services multiple locations (www.homevault.com). From our local offices in the city center, we also service neighboring towns and communities ( ex: we have an office in Charlotte NC, from which we service Charlotte plus a dozen other towns nearby). We wanted to avoid creating dozens of extra local service pages, particularly since our offers are identical per metropolitan area and we're talking of 20-30 additional local pages for each area. Instead, we decided to create local service pages only for the main locations. Needless to say, we're now ranking for the main locations, but we're missing on all searches for property management in neighboring towns (we're doing good on searches such as 'charlotte property management', but we're practically invisible for 'davidson property management', although we're searvicing that area as well). What we've done so far to try and fix the situation: 1. The current location pages do include descriptions of areas that we serve. 2. We've included 1-2 keywords for the sattelite locations in the main location pages, but we're nowhere near the optimization needed to rank for local searches in neighboring towns (ie, some main local service pages rank on pages 2-4 for sattelite towns, so not good enough). 3. We've included the searviced areas in our local GMBs, directories, social media profiles etc. None of these solutions appear to work great. Should I go ahead and create the classic local pages for each and every town and optimize them on those particular keywords, even if the offer is practically the same, and the number of pages risks going out of control? Any other better ideas? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HomeVaultPM0 -
PDF ranking higher than HTML pages, solution?
Hello Moz community I know this question has been asked before but it seems there is no real answer other than putting a summary of the PDF on the HTML page. My problem is other websites are using my PDFs, I have some PDFs with very high authority links and I would like to either pass the link juice on to my product/category page or do rel=canonical somehow. I'm using bigcommerce as my platform. My website is cwwltd.com. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neverstop1231 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search?
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
About us. Contact us
Services. Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png0 -
Can I tell Google to Ignore Parts of a Page?
Hi all, I was wondering if there was some sort of html trick that I could use to selectively tell a search engine to ignore texts on certain parts of a page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock
Charles0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Why does Google add my domain as a suffix to page title in SERPS?
Hi, If I do a search in Google - for one our products on our site, our site comes up - but it would appear that google is adding our domain name as a suffix to our title in the results... Anyone else seen this? Can I do anything about it? I would prefer it not to appear. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640