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
-
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Moving Content From One Site To Another
Generally speaking if I am just moving a couple of articles from one site to another I need to 301 redirect those old URL's to the new ones right? And even if a webpage doesn't have any links pointing to it, it is best practice to employ 301 redirects correct? After a while, after Google etc. has crawled the new location of the content you can then delete the old URL, is that right? And if other sites are linking to the old location they should be notified of the new location but even if a page has links pointing to it, is it best practice to delete that page after Google has crawled the new and you've notified the webmaster? I've think I've got this right, I just want some clarification on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ThridHour0 -
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 -
How to link site.com/blog or site.com/blog/
Hello friends, I have a very basic question but I can not find the right answer... I have made my blog linkbuilding using the adress "mysite.com/blog" but now im not sure if is better to do the linkbuilding to "mysite.com**/blog/ "** Is there any diference? Thanks...
Technical SEO | | lans27870 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Ranking Multi-Language Site
Recently we updated our website to a new version. Our website has a structure in which the English page is our main page with about 50 subpages. All these pages are translated in 5 different languages. The different languages are divided into folders. For example www.ourdomain.com/de containts all german pages. The pages with products would be for example: www.ourdomain.com/products for english and www.ourdomain.com/de/produkte for the german page. On our previous website this used to be simililar. After the website update the SEOMoz crawls are showning duplicated page content/title errors for the pages saying that the pages in other languages have the same content/title as the basis English webpage. Any idea how I can solve these errors?
Technical SEO | | Exp0 -
For a UK business where there is no .co.uk or .com opportunity, is it better to have a .net address or would .uk.com be better? Or no difference...This company is UK focussed only.
We have a niche keyword domain possibility but I am not sure which way, if any, is better. The .com and .co.uk options are not available but there are various other ones - including .org, .net, .uk.com. Is there any domain/seo benefit of one version over another? Any thought gratefully received..
Technical SEO | | cpdigital10 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0