Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
-
Hi there,
I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right?
Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory:
/health/flu/keyword-1
/health/flu/keyword-2 and so on...
I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content
- On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages
- Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords)
- More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords)
- More page visits (Via Adwords)
- Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages
So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing.
Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case)
If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
-
Hi Gary,
Not sure I can add anything not said here, but if you feel inclined to send me a PM with the URLs, I'd be more than happy to take a look at it.
-
Hi Cyrus,
I forgot to mention I put canonical and hreflang tags on both pages in question .co.uk & .ie and it now seems that Google has finally crawled the .ie page, unfortunately it's on Google.ie the keyword is no longer ranked, the good news is that When i paste the first paragraph of the .co.uk page into Google.co.uk it's the .co.uk page that appears not the .ie webpage.
Is there no way of the .ie version ranking at all in Google.ie? it seems a shame that Google cannot get this right.
Thanks
-
Hi Gary,
Good question. Could be a couple of things going on. Let me address each in turn.
1. Duplicate content and the Irish version of your site. Could be an issue if you're duplicating content, even with the hreflang tags. Google also recommends to use canonical tags on international versions in addition to hreflang tags if the the content is duplicated.
Good discussion here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.htmland here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN2. Fresh content. In general, fresh content will help your rankings. But there are a couple of things to look out for when updating your content.
- If the content changes significantly from the original, Google may interpret as contextually different, and alter it's ranking score.
- Same for title tags and other on-page factors. If these change too much from the original, Google may do a "reset" on the page, which basically says "this is an entirely new subject, so you have to earn your rankings again.
- Internal links. Sometimes our content ranks from the power of internal text links, and we can inadvertently change these when updating content. In the absence of strong external link signals, this effect can be strong.
If you kept your content, subject matter and internal links fairly consistent, there may be other factors at work, such as an algorythm update or the aforementioned dupe content issue.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi Aaron,
I have done very little in terms of link building for these pages, and the pages I have got back links on they are from authority websites, so it makes it very unlikely that this is the cause of the issue.
I just can't figure out what the issue could be, I mean for all pages in that directory to not be ranked anymore, it just seems to much of a coincidence that all the pages in this directory had been re-written, then one week later they vanish from the SERPs.
Any more suggestions would be very grateful.
-
It really sounds like a mistaken black-listing, if the ranking has dropped "all together". It could be based on content, but if your bounce rate is dropping, your content is better, and if there was a mistake made, I think some bad back-links are more likely.
If this occurred at the end of February, it would predate PENGUIN, but black-listings do occur between updates. One idea for resolving it would be to check some of the lower domain-authority backlinks, go to their site, and then from there, check other sites they are linking to, and see if those sites have also suffered. Once you target the location of the bad-links, you can start your clean up from there.
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
-
Fetch and render partial result could this affect SERP rankings [NSFW URL]
Moderator's Note: URL NSFW We have been desperately trying to understand over the last 10 days why our homepage disappears for a few days in the SERPS for our most important keywords, before reappearing again for a few more days and then gone again! We have tried everything. Checked Google webmaster - no manual actions, no crawl errors, no messages. The site is being indexed even when it disappears but when it's gone it will not even appear in the search results for our business name. Other internal pages come up instead. We have searched for bad back links. Duplicate content. We put a 301 redirect on the non www. version of the site. We added a H1 tag that was missing. Still after fetching as Google and requesting reindexing we were going through this cycle of disappearing in the rankings (an internal page would actually come in at 6th position as opposed to our home page which had previously spent years in the number 2 spot) and then coming back for a few days. Today I tried fetch and render as Google and was only getting a partial result. It was saying the video that we have embedded on our home page was temporarily unavailable. Could this have been causing the issue? We have removed the video for now and fetched and rendered and returned a complete status. I've now requested reindexing and am crossing everything that this fixes the problem. Do you think this could have been at the root of the problem? If anyone has any other suggestions the address is NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GemmaApril2 -
_Styling in my SERP, why?_
So Google is using an tag for my SERP snippet and there is styling in that that uses _and for some reason that _is showing up in the snippet itself. So "blah, blah blah, _19.99 _blah" is what is being displayed. How do I prevent this from happening? I thought styling within the header tags was fine? So what I am trying to do basically: Adventure Bear 16 oz or Adventure Bear 1.1oz Is this allowed or am I making a terrible mistake here? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Chris Birkholm____0 -
On Page Content. has a H2 Tag but should I also use H3 tags for the sub headings within this body of content
Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Massive SERP crash
I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords. Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms. I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahyde0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Remove content that is indexed?
Hi guys, I want to delete a entire folder with content indexed, how i can explain to google that content no longer exists?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
Best practices for handling https content?
Hi Mozzers - I'm having an issue with https content on my site that I need help with. Basically we have some pages that are meant to be secured, cart pages, auth pages, etc, and then we have the rest of the site that isn't secured. I need those pages to load correctly and independently of one another so that we are using both protocols correctly. Problem is - when a secure page is rendered the resources behind it (scripts, etc) won't load with the unsecured paths that are in our master page files currently. One solution would be to render the entire site in https only, however this really scares me from an SEO standpoint. I don't know if I want to put my eggs in that basket. Another solution is to structure the site so that secure pages are built differently from unsecured pages, but that requires a bit of re-structuring and new SOPs to be put in place. I guess my question is really about best practices when using https. How can I avoid duplication issues? When do I need to use rel=canonical? What is the best way to do things here to avoid heavy maintenance moving forward?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Canonical Not Fixing Duplicate Content
I added a canonical tag to the home page last month, but I am still showing duplicate content for the home page. Here is the tag I added: What am I missing? Duplicate-Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InnoInsulation0