Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
-
Hi all,
I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down
This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered.
So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed.
I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam?
Many thanks in advance for all your help.
-
I think part of the problem you're seeing Michael is due to Google's preference for fresh content. It's more prevalent in some industries but I have noticed the rankings boost you get from it is temporary. It degrades over time.
-
Hi Michael,
Glad to see you got help! If you're happy with the responses, would you mind marking this question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, I'll give it some time and as you say look at my site and try to figure out why one is ranking and the other is not.
thanks again
-
Hi Michael,
Then I would guess you want to be optimising for something like "Inspirational quotes from Edmund Hilary" or "Inspirational quotes from Albert Einstein"? There is a much bigger discussion to be had here that could reach more people.
Perhaps give the page some time and see if there are opportunities to create some internal links. Look at the stats from your other page and see why this is ranking, but the new one isn't. I am sure if you performed a mini audit, you would see lots of options that could help with this.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Many thanks for replying, really appreciate it.
That's a fair comment - I must admit that we thought we had enough content in there, but maybe not by the sounds of things. This page - http://www.getinspired365.com/genius - which is an old style page and been around for a few years - seems to rank 3rd in Google when you type in that quote (Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered) but this has even less content than our new style pages and is also not optimised in any way. Having said that, we can certainly try to add more content to the page to see if that helps things.
And yes that makes complete sense. So the purpose of this page is for people to find the quote (and be inspired by it in some way - although this quote isn't the best!), and then find out some additional information about the person that said the quote, and also have links to more Edmund Hillary quotes, and links to other inspiring people. So it's not meant to be spammy in any way - certainly not our intention. Our intention is to provide people interesting quotes, in a visually nice way whilst being able to learn a little bit more about that author. Optimise wise we try and optimise on the quote itself, as that is the focus for us and what we are about. We'll try and add more content and see if that makes any difference.
Many thanks
-
Hi Gaston,
That's really helpful. Thanks.
The new pages are only around 2 weeks old - the ones that have appeared then dropped. The ones that still appear ranked are a few years old. So I guess we could know more in 3-4 weeks to see what our true position is.
I will have a read of those three links you've sent to me and see if there's anything that applies to us/could be affecting us. Many thanks for your reply.
-
Hi Michael,
The first thing I would say, is that the page is somewhat lacking in actual content. There are only 168 words on there and this to me would suggest a thin page in Google's eyes.
You then have to ask yourself, who am I trying to attract to the page and what do I offer them when they get there? Do I answer a question in enough detail that Google is going to rank me well for it?
Is the page about Mountaineering or Edmund Hilary? What is the purpose of the page? What phrase are are you trying to optimize for?
I hope this makes sense?
-Andy
-
Hi,
How old are the pages that you are tracking? Have you considered that SERPs will fluctuate for a few weeks since google indexed them?
Also, you should take into consideration that January has been a really windy month in the SERPs, that's because there have been many updates on the Google Algorithm.
Check them out here:
Google Algorithm Change History - Moz.com
Algaroo.com
Mozcast.comYou should also take consideration, as you've said, that your pages aren't optimized over SEO.
I'd recommend you that learn about the major updates that have been over january and analize wether your site may be not suitable for google to rank you better.Hope it helps.
GR
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
-
New page disappeared from the ranks, under dubious circumstances
I've had an odd situation happen today. Published a blog post and it ranked No 6 within 2 or 3 hours, just come back now (About 12 hours later) and it has completely vanished! I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere! It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Any thoughts would be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Why some pages show schema and some don't in Google?
I notice Google displays the schema(reviews, price, availability etc.) in results only for some of our item pages in same category using same template. Any ideas why this is happening. They are created around same time - more than a year ago. Schema was also added a year ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rbai0 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Homepage not ranking for main keyword, all other pages ranking slightly for their own keyword phrases.
Dear Mozzers, We have an ecommerce website (www.pashmina-boutique.com), we want to rank the homepage for the keyword "pashmina". Problem is, we are nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100 search results of Google. It is indexed, we have no crawl errors, except that we had some problems with our hosting (503's), the crawler of Google bumped in a few of those. And we are fixing it. Our other pages, e.g. (http://www.pashmina-boutique.com/15-white-pashminas) ranks for "white pashminas" 24th and "white cashmere pashminas" 23rd. We have done no linkbuilding, in Majestic, you can check that. We have been offline for a long time (over 6 months) and about 3 weeks ago, we did a redesign (SEO). We relaunched, everything is looking fine except the homepage isn't ranking for the main keyword. Could you guys check it out? Is it over-optimization? It can't be Penguin, Panda would be a surprise too. Or do we still have to wait for the monthly Panda data-refresh? We are currently busy with this issue, once this is solved - that the homepage is ranking - we will start linkbuilding. Mr.1000
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr.10000 -
How do you check the google cache for hashbang pages?
So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage. My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
How can we improve rankings for category pages
Hi Everyone, I have a dog breeder site I'm working on and I was wondering if I could get some tips and ideas on things to do to help the "category" pages rank better in search engines. Let's say I have "xyz" breed category page which has listings of all dog breeders who offer that particular breed, in this case "xyz". I have certain breeder profile listings which rank higher for those terms that the category page should be ranking for. So I'm guessing Google thinks those breeder profile pages are more relevant for those terms. Especially if well optimized. I know thin content may be my problem here, but one of our competitors dominates the rankings for relevant keywords with no content on their category pages. What do you all suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rsanchez0 -
How to improve ranking of deep pages?
While this may sound like an obvious or stupid question at first...let me explain... We are an e-commerce website which sells one type of item nationally; for sake of an example which is similar to us, you can think of an e-commerce site that sells movie theater tickets in cities and towns across the country. Our home page ranks very well for the appropriate keywords as well as some of our state and city pages rank very well for local searches. However, while some state and city pages rank well for their respective local searches, others have a low page rank with some not even in the top 50 for their respective keywords. My question is that we aren't clear why some pages will rank well while others wont when the competition looks similar for those local searches. And in today's Panda/Penguin era we are unsure of how to get more of these state/city pages ranking better? For the record, we are quite strict about on-page SEO, 99% of our 5600 pages are crawled & we have minimum SEO errors from the SEOMoz crawls. Can anyone provide some feedback & thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTSupp0