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
-
Website ranking stuck on 2nd page of google. How to bring it in top 10 position??
Hi I am working on a site indianhomeappliances.in that for search terms such as 'best washing machine in india' appears near the top of the 2nd page of Googl for url https://indianhomeappliances.in/best-washing-machine-in-india/ When looking at what is listed on the 1st page for 'best washing machine in india' I would appreciate any advice/guidance on what else could be done to give the site a final push to get on the 1st page of search results. I have made more than 60 backlinks along with sites from competitor analysis via moz for this page Looking at the sites that are on the 1st page I cant understand why many of them are ranking higher than me? Any insight and plan of attack would be most appreciated from any search experts on the forum. My website is 2.5 months old. Many Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pank00770 -
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Brand name not ranking in Google
Hi Moz'ers, Could you help me with something I cannot seem to figure out by myself. In June 2017 my company started a rebranding campaign. We've changed our brand name and launched a new website: https://spotler.com. Everything is going fine, but if you Google our brand name "Spotler" our website doesn't show up. How can it be? Our domain authority is 38. It would be wonderful if you could help me. Let me know if you need more information. Best, Simone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spotler0 -
Do 403 Forbidden errors from website pages hurt rankings?
Hi All, I noticed that our website has lot of 403 errors across different pages using the tool http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/. Do these errors hurt website rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0