Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs

[Paul78]

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

ZCJDa

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[Paul78]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.html

and here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN

2. 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!

[Paul78]

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.

[akorff]

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.