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
-
Duplicate Page Content
We have different plans that you can signup for - how can we rectify the duplicate page content and title issue here? Thanks. | http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=100 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=104 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=116 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=117 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=102 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=119 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=101 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=103 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 1 | 200 |
| http://signup.directiq.com/?plan=5 |0 -
How Does Google Deal with Negative Reviews or Mentions
I would really like to get everyone's opinion on how you all think Google deals with negative reviews, or just mentions on negative websites. One of my clients has a page on a powerful negative website (one that is designed to shame all those on it), and no other real reviews around the web. I have never seen any evidence that Google takes positive or negative reviews into account when ranking websites. But maybe one of you has? Currently when you search for my client by name, the negative website comes up second, which is obviously embarrassing for them. If we sought out a whole load of positive (obviously genuine) reviews from happy clients, do you think this might influence the prominent placement of this negative website? Also would it influence the ranking of the website in general? I would love to hear your opinions on this topic. [BTW We have already explored the path of the right to be forgotten, but it seems to be inundated so we are not holding our breaths.]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagada0 -
Is legacy duplicate content an issue?
I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content. The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime 😉 ] The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit. Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 ! Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fammy0 -
What is best practice to eliminate my IP addr content from showing in SERPs?
Our eCommerce platform provider has our site load balanced in a few data centers. Our site has two of our own exclusive IP addresses associated with it (one in each data center). Problem is Google is showing our IP addresses in the SERPs with what I would assume is bad duplicate content (our own at that). I brought this to the attention of our provider and they say they must keep the IP addresses open to allow their site monitoring software to work. Their solution was to add robots.txt files for both IP addresses with site wide/root disallows. As a side note, we just added canonical tags so the pages indexed within the IP addresses ultimately show the correct URL (non IP address) via the canonical. So here are my questions. Is there a better way? If not, is there anything else we need to do get Google to drop the several hundred thousand indexed pages at the IP address level? Or do we sit back and wait now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ovenbird0 -
Getting backlinks without content marketing
Hey i have a client who currently has a large ecommerce store with over 50,000 hits a months. I've made the recommendation that they should consider adding a blog and invest in content activities. However they won't be able to do so for quite some time. In the mean time what are some ways i can get backlinks (whitehat only). I'm thinking guest posting on high DA blogs and sites is the best bet. Also sponsorship, CSR activties, and the occasional press release. Can anyone recommend any other ways, or methods i can use to obtain good quality links, or articles which discuss this topic. Thanks, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Google badge extracted to SERPs
It's a while ago that (i thought) I read the following information on the Google badge. Here https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/ we have the implementation guide, however I was under the impression the Google badge could be thereafter extracted into SERPs so the user could follow etc... direct from SERPs. I can't find anything confirming this. I think that it might clash with authorship data which does a similar job, but where a site page is not relevant to authorship at all, I would have thought linking back to the G+ page from SERPs was a sensible option. Can anyone confirm the Google badge can appear in SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richcowley0 -
Video SERP assistance needed
I'm working on a site with a great deal of video content. We also have a youTube page. I've recently created a site map and submitted to Google. I really want for our videos to show up in our search results, but so far, nothings happening. Site: www.roydwyer.com Any advise to what's missing? Thanx in advance! annular-tear.php
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aaronetics0