My site fell off the serps for two keywords I tried to optimize the home page for
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I was doing some keyword research about 45 days ago and stumbled across two keywords that I was ranking in the mid hundreds and decided I wanted to see if I could rank them.
I went in and changed my title to my blog, and the description. Then about a week later I changed my mind and wanted to go for two other keywords so I changed it again.
Then within a day or two, my site completely fell off the serps for those two key words that I changed the title to optimize for.
None of my other rankings were effected for any of the other keywords, in fact most of my keywords have risen because of recent backlinking.
I thought it was just a temporary google bounce because I was playing with my title of my blog or something, but after almost two months I am still nowhere to be found for words that I should easily at least be in the top 1000, especially because I was at about 150 by accident.
Anyone have any ideas on what might have happened?
Thanks.
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Hey Ryan, thanks for the tips. However as I mentioned I know I haven't done any on page optimization for those terms.
I was already in the serps, then updated my title tags a few times while I was doing different keyword searches and then changing my mind. Then I disappeared from the serps.
So I guess I should have been more clear. I am wondering if there is some sort of google penalty for changing your main title tags around too much. I don't think there is, but if I am not going to get back for those terms no matter what I do, I didn't want to spend time trying to optimize for those if it was pointless.
It is just weird that I was at least in the results and as soon as I was going to optimize and changed the title and description, then bam I was totally gone. Thought maybe someone would have a guess, but if not, I can move forward and optimize for those and give it a month and see if I show back up.
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I don't understand why you feel your site would rank at all for the two terms you selected. They are not used once in your content.
Simply adding a title to a page does not help your SERP if you do not have supporting content. In fact, I would expect the exact result you are experiencing.
You have many opportunities to improve your page ranking for those terms. Here are some quick changes you can make:
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Use those exact phrases in your content a few times.
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Use anchor text elsewhere in your site to link back to your home page.
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Change your anchor text on your home page to something helpful. "Read more" is not going to help get the results you desire.
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Work on improving your ALT tags to helpful key word phrases
Without these changes, your site will simply not appear in the top 1000 in my opinion. A final thought. Focus on a long tail key phrase which can land your site on the first page. Improving your ranking from 150 to 40 isn't really helpful. You are still buried in the pile and are unlikely to be found.
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see above for the site. How do I look back at the cache? It has been over a month and still hasn't shown back up in the top 1000
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It would be so very helpful if you could share your site and the keywords.
On a few occasions I offered generic answers to this type of question, then when the original poster shared their site information, the root issue was something quite different.
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It's always tough to say without seeing the site. As you know, so many variables are involved. That is strange & it would be helpful to look back at the cache to see which one it picked up before you dropped off those specific SERPs. My guess is you'll be back where you started within a few days.
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