Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
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Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website.
After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword.
Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
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Hi Keri and Thanks for your inquiry. We have kept our focus on the content swap and moved forward with our link building strategy to accommodate the swap. Everything seems to be holding strong at this point. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. ~ Brian
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I don't have much else help to add to this question, but wondering how things are looking now, and if anything has changed in the past couple of weeks.
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Hello Keri and thank you! The Content Swap #4. I should have put it to a test a few weeks ago
We did change the title tag for the homepage & tweeked the the product page title (just a little). I over looked this because we included the keywords in both title tags after re-write and tweak.We added a blog as a sub-domain earlier in March of this year. When the serp's changed we directed our keyword targeting efforts towards the new results. Link count is no more than five. Link building started after the serp change.
Since your question I have taken a deeper look into our site's link structure. And started with adding canonical/nofollow tags. Our page authority went from 1 to 27 fyi (top-level categories).
Is there a possibility the big "g" would again, swap our serp once more, back to the original homepage link for these keywords? Ideally for conversion purposes we would work with our current results. Thanks again for the right question. Your input is welcomed.
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Hi Brian,
Did the PPC landing page gain any links? Were there any other changes made to the structure of the site?
Rand did a post about a year ago regarding several reasons why you may have the wrong page in the results. Do any of those reasons seem to fit?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
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