How do sites manage to rank better with no fresh content
-
hi, trying to work out why there are lots of sites that are ranking better than me. Our site www.in2town.co.uk has always been on the first page and for a long time we were number one in google for the term lifestyle magazine as well as being on the first page for other keywords.
Our site is www.in2town.co.uk
We had a site upgrade a few months ago and since then we have seen our rankings have dropped like a lead balloon.
I do not understand why sites such as the following seem to rank better than me for the word lifestyle magazine
http://www.24sevenlifestyle.com/
http://www.lifestylesmagazine.com/website/
http://motabilitylifestyle.co.uk/
http://www.alifestylemagazine.com/
if anyone can help me understand what i am doing wrong and why my rankings have gone out of the window then it would be a huge help.
-
just wanted to let everyone know that since the help i received yesterday we have noticed our rankings improved, we have gone from page nine to page six, so thank you everyone
-
hi, i have now sorted out the www.in2town.co.uk and the in2town.co.uk and also the canonical tag, i hope i have done it right.
I am going to start a new post as i have come across a few problems since i have done this which includes the meta description not showing according to a seo tool even though i can see it.
many thanks for your help
-
That will help with the duplication issues in a temporary fashion but redirecting is the only true way to solve the issue we're talking about here. Mainly because canonicals don't pass link juice so if any links are pointed to the non-www they won't carry through.
If I were you I'd avoid adding that line until after the redirect is done just because.
-
thank you, will contact them now. can you let me know if this is what i should be putting in my head of my site to fix things or is this wrong
-
Yes contact your hosting company. The process depends on whether they are running an Apache or IIS server. I'm sure they will know how to handle it for you.
Good luck!
-
Excellent points Dana and I think you're absolutely partially correct. I strongly agree that there are a "whole lotta things all working together" that need to all be addressed. For sure!
As for the "how big of a deal is this redirect" discussion, I think it depends and differs case-by-case.
I also discovered this issue at the company I'm currently working at when I started there 8 months ago. I also discovered a ton of other weird issues related (like 2 index pages.. !?!?!) that I literally had to argue with the engineers over for days.. (They honestly believed we needed an index.htm and index.html page with identical content.. I think they still do even. ugh)
Anyway I FINALLY got them all redirected and we absolutely saw improvement. (Also, going from PR3 to PR4 is a big deal!! I'd throw a party for a PR bump!) We saw improvement in almost every one of our target keywords.
Here's why I think our cases differ: It all depends how the links were built prior. Meaning if you have links built to domain.com and to www.domain.com equally, the juice will be split between them and when that redirect happens your main domain will get a bump. This is what happened in our case and I knew it would going into it as I did a nice long scouring of our link profile prior.
So I'm guessing in your case they had all correctly built/gained links to the same version of the domain keeping it from being split.
Still it is my experience that when you get a link some people go domain.com and some go www.domain.com and in this case if the two are different you will definitely lose out on some great juice.
Nonetheless Dana, you are absolutely right that there is no end-all be-all in this business. (That's why we all love it so much, right?!) And it's also why I tried to stress that this person go through your list as well as heed my advice. Your list is much more thorough and a great launching pad for anyone looking into a similar issue.
Onwards!
-
hi thanks for this. we sorted this out last time with the www. so i take it the person who done the upgrade did not sort it out this time around.
can you let me know the best way to sort this out, should i tell my hosting company or is it something that i can do. i will want to have the www. version. also what is the best way of putting the canonical in place. i was reading about it and it says i should be putting it in the head.
should i put this in my head position of my template, i am using joomla, i have seen there are a number of examples but which one would be right for my site.
would be great to learn how to sort this and thank you for letting me know what the problem is.
-
I agree with Jesse on the duplicate content issue. However, and maybe as a secondary question (that I would love to hear feedback on), does resolving the duplicate content issue from redirecting one version of a domain to another have any real measurable impact on a site's performance?
In my own experience, it doesn't.
Here's why I say this. Of course, I'm long-winded, so it involves a story... I came onboard at my current company in September 2011 as an in-house SEO. There was and still are a lot of technical SEO issues that haven't been resolved. However, some things we have successfully conquered. This "www" versus "non-www" was one of them. We hadn't redirected one to the other. It's always exciting to find something you know is wrong and be able to fix it fairly easily and inexpensively. We fixed it...and? Absolutely nothing changed...Well, that's probably not accurate. After this change and several other technicals SEO fixes (i.e. making our canonical tags absolute instead of relative) our PageRank went from 3 to 4. That's it. Rankings didn't improve. Market share didn't improve. Traffic didn't improve. Conversions didn't improve. In fact, they all went the other way.
The only reason I bring this up is because I think there's this overwhelming desire that all we have to do is find that "one thing" that's dragging our site down, fix it, and boom, everything will be rainbows and unicorns. Should these things be fixed? Absolutely. Just don't expect that any one of them is going to show any kind of significant impact. Make a strategy, come up with tactics to support it, and pursue them with dogged determination. Chances are, your problem is never just one thing, but a whole lotta things that are all working together to drag your site down.
-
Everything that Dana said is awesome. Look into it all. But before you do any of that, fix this huge problem:
Your site is duplicated. Very possible you have a panda problem on your hands if your rankings have tanked as you say.
You need to either pick the www version or the non-www version and redirect one to the other. This is the most vital thing you can do quickly and easily and is an absolute must.
You don't even have a canonical tag in there. (NOTE: You cannot fix this with just a canonical. You need to 301 redirect one to the other.) But right now google sees two separate sites. One at www.in2town.co.uk and the other at http://in2town.co.uk
Do this and then address what Dana handily listed out for you.
P.S. All of those sites outranking you have 301 redirects in place... This is huge you should heed my advice.
-
thanks for the info, very interesting. I am looking at building some smaller sites on a subdomain name so may try this. many thanks for your help
-
Hi Tim,
I understand you frustration and it really could be so many things causing this that it's impossible to say for sure without digging in deeper. Here are some initial things I would say could be factors:
- The very first thing I noticed is that every single one of the competing sites you mentioned has the word "lifestyle" in their URL." Two of them have "lifestyle" AND "magazine" somewhere in their URL. I find that interesting.
- When you redesigned, did you change any or all of your URLs? If so, then it might be worth meticulously working your way through your 301 redirects and make sure they are all functioning properly.
- Even if your 301s are fine (if your URLs changed), or even if you simply re-platformed, but kept your URLs the same, a drop in rankings and traffic after a big change like that is completely normal. I've seen drops of anywhere from 25-75% that lasted for anywhere from a few weeks to 6 months or more before beginning to recover.
- While "fresh content" is most likely an element in Google's algorithm, it is only one of over 200 other elements and none of us know to what extent one element has more weight in effecting rankings than another. If you are competing against established sites, with a lot of social signals (i.e. customer reviews), inbound links, etc. it may not matter that they don't update their content very often. A great piece of content that isn't time-sensitive really doesn't need to (and probably shouldn't) be constantly updated.
- It doesn't sound like you changed your domain when you redesigned the site, but if you did, this could firther complicate matters.
It might be worth an experiment to build a micro site on a domain that contains one or both of your keywords. Maybe target a specific niche or location and see how well it does. If it does great, link it back to your original site, if it bombs, you won't have harmed your existing asset. These are just thoughts.
You might also want to consider revisiting your keyword research and seeing if there are any opportunities that your competitors aren't leveraging. I bet there are some nuggets you'd get out of that exercise. Sorry, no definitive answers here, but hopefully some things to think about to help you strategize a solution. Cheers!
Dana
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
-
Ranking for non-existing content which is 301 redirected
Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?
Technical SEO | | benesmartin0 -
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
Is placing content in sub directories better for SERP
Hi For small web sites with less than 6 pages Is there a benefit to structuring url paths using keyword rich sub directories compared to pages in the root of the site. for example: domainname.co.uk/keywordpagename.html or www.domainname.co.uk/keyword/keywordpagename.html which seems to have better rankings? thanks keyword
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
How to turn WP site into Ecom site?
I have a couple of old wordpress sites that are old affiliate blogs. I currently sell products that are on amazon on these sites and sell quite a bit of volume. I have found a source and can afford the inventory to replace Amazon with my own product. So the dilema is how to turn these wordpress sites into ecommerce sites. The thing I am worried most about is that each site gets about 100-200 visitors a day for great buying keywords. I obviously don't want to lose my rankings. What are the options of turning a wordpress site into a store. I am not interested in plugins or some of the other solutions that make the store look very cheap and I would assume horribly convert. If you have inner pages ranking for keywords how does that work? Do the post pages become product pages? So to sum up I guess I am asking, what are the options that are of the higher quality that will also help me keep my rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
301 an old site to a newer site...
Hi First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche. Here's the details, then the questions... There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week. Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term. Here are my questions; 1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for? 2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites? 3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?
Technical SEO | | RR5000 -
Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?
Noticed that a high-profile site uses a very flat structure for there content. It essentially places most landing pages right under the root domain folder. So a more conventional site might use this structure: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/landing-page-3/ This site in question - a successful one - would deploy the same content like this: www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-2/ www.widgets.com/landing-page-3/ So when you're clicking deeper into the nav. options the clicks always roll up to the "top level." Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal. Why would a site take the plunge and organize content in this way? What was the clincher?
Technical SEO | | DisneyFamily1