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.
Ranking dropped after change single page url, should I change it back?
-
I was making updates to the content on the following page, and a few days later dropped from #2 SERP ranking to 50+.
Things I checked:
Yes, 301 redirect was implemented right away.
After publishing, I manually requested indexing in search console.
Right after publishing I re-submitted the sitemap manually and Google said they had not crawled it in 9 days.
My question: should I change the URL back to the old one, or give it a little more time (especially since I re-submitted sitemap)
Original URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/
New URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical-insurance/
-
Thanks Boyd for such a detailed reply. This is all very helpful information!
-
Well essentially there were 3 major changes that happened at the same time (in Google's eyes): the url change, overhauling your content, and getting rid of the site-wide link from your navigation.
I know you said that the navigation link drop happened a month ago, but you have to remember that no change on your website affects your rankings for good or bad until Google comes back and crawls your page(s) and sees the change.
Some of your main pages probably were crawled within a few days of the navigation change but the majority of pages weren't re-crawled for a few weeks after that change. I can still find some of your pages that haven't been crawled since before the navigation change.
Now, I don't think that the content change is what's hurting you because you added more useful content. Although maybe you have over optimized it a bit for "travel medical insurance" since that exact phrase shows up 48 times.
URL changes with proper 301 redirect implementation can drop your rankings temporarily but my experience has always been to gain back the temporary loss soonish afterwards.
If it were my site, I'd do the following:
- Immediately put back the link pointing to that page in the navigation with the same anchor text it had before
- Wait about two to three weeks after that to see if any ranking recovery has happened
- If no change, I'd drop that exact match phrase several times from the article (then wait for it to be recrawled to assess if it helped or not)
- Then if no change still, I'd test changing the content back to the old page keeping the new URL
- Then if no change still, I'd change the redirect back
My hope is that you'll recover the rankings after just putting the navigation link back.
Good luck
-
There are many factors that affect on dropping in ranking. It happened with me also once upon a time, Here is strategy applied by me:
Left new url for 7 days.
Did not update or replace url in those 7 days.
I saw improvement in ranking and yes, my new ranking was better than previous one. SEO is game of patience. Have that with you
-
Thanks Boyd, below are thee clarifications:
- For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"
Yes
- How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.
Significant content changes including adding clarifying topics (header and content), added images, added a FAQ section, added outbound link to authority sources.
- Did you change the title tag?
No
- Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link to link in the navigation to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I didn't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?
No, the main navigation change (removing the Plans dropdown) happened about 1 month ago (end of Jan)
- Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?
No
Thanks very much for whatever insight you can provide, much appreciated and let me know if you need anything else.
-
Some clarifying questions:
- For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"
- How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.
- Did you change the title tag?
- Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link pointing to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I don't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?
- Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?
Right now I am seeing that Google has recrawled the new page and has recognized the 301 redirect because when you do a "site:https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/" search, Google lists the new URL in the results and the cached version's most recent date is 2/24/20 at 21:21:18 GMT.
I wouldn't change the redirect back just yet. But I need answers to the above questions before giving you my final opinion.
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
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Home page keyword in url
I have been looking into SEO for a few weeks now trying to perfect a homepage. Going through various sources on MOZ, and other examples out there on the internet, I keep seeing that you should have your keyword in the URL of the page. The homepage is the page most people want to rank the highest in google searches, however, you cannot put the keyword in the URL as most home page URLs are simply /. Should I actually make the home like this: www.example.com/key-word-example? I would imagine this would not be the normal for many users and would seem like it's not the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | Matthew_smart0 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
Two URL's for the same page
Hi, on our site we have two separate URL's for a page that has the same content. So, for example - 'www.domain.co.uk/stuff' and 'www.domain.co.uk/things/stuff' both have the same content on the page. We currently rank high in search for 'www.domain.co.uk/things/stuff' for our targeted keyword, but there are numerous links on the site to www.domain.co.uk/stuff and also potentially inbound links to this page. Ideally we want just the www.domain.co.uk/things/stuff URL to be present on the site, what would be the best course of action to take? Would a simple Canonical tag from the '/stuff' URL which points to the '/things/stuff' page be wise? If we were to scrap the '/stuff' URL totally and redirect it to the 'things/stuff' URL and change all our on site links, would this be beneficial and not harm our current ranking for '/things/stuff'? We only want 1 URL for this page for numerous reasons (i.e, easier to track in Analytics), but I'm a bit cautious that changing the page that doesn't rank may have an affect on the page that does rank! Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Jaybeamer2 -
Splash page - is it possible to rank well?
Hi there, I have a website with splash page - http://veda4.com/ . It's trully cool looking, the owner of our company wants the home page to be this way. But is it ok from SEO viewpoint? Can it rank well for keywords. All my SEO strategy were not using splash pages and I am not sure what should I change so it work with splash page also. I myself won't choose splash page but my boss trully liked it.
On-Page Optimization | | HrishikeshKarov0 -
How do I PERMANENTLY change an incorrect URL link with one of my keywords?
Hello, I received an “F” grade on my on-page report for one of my keywords. I noticed that the URL linked with that keyword was wrong. After changing it to the correct URL, I received an “A.” However, the change was not permanent. How do I permanently change the URL? I don’t see any “Save Changes” or “Apply Changes” button anywhere. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0