Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
-
Hello Team,
I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
-
Here in INDIA, it's on #1. I think it's recovering.
-
I see it ranked #7 for that term
-
Hey Rob,
Just go to google and type "Useful Macro Codes". Check if my page is there.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Hey Puneet,
Well, the update may have removed the canonical tag from your site with respect to the content, assuming you created a new URL for it to rest on. It just depends on how you went about making the change. If the page remains live but is simply redirecting to another with the update, you wouldn't lose the canonical reference to your content regardless of what someone else did in terms of putting it on their site.
Your post wouldn't lose rankings even if it was duplicated on another site - Google now only removes benefits from duplicating content, it doesn't penalize you for it.
While it's annoying that someone would copy your content, I think that's a red herring here. Give it a couple of days and I bet it will come back with similar rankings to what you're familiar with - maybe even improved with the new content.
Keep in mind that the new page your content rests on does not have a link profile to speak of, whereas your old page had lots of time to build up user review information and links. In effect, Google thinks it is looking at a brand new page, not a revision of a previous one. It will take time to recover rankings (a couple of days) but it will happen.
Last thing I hadn't considered - April 1 there was a renewed rollout of the Penguin algorithm - is it possible that there are some spammy links pointing to this page that might be influencing its rankings? I had a couple of clients that saw similar drops on April 1st but they are rebounding now.
All the best,
Rob
-
Yup James, you are right. I think the only weapon I have is Patience.
Thanks again for the help, James.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Thanks for the valuable stuff, Rob. You are like a Guardian Angel.
But, I have skipped a big part of this whole story, I'm sorry for that. So, let me come again.
**Part 1: **On 31st Mar, I have updated one of my old posts and redirected it to a new one. On 4th Apr, when I checked, my post was nowhere in the SERP. But it was indexed. I didn't change any content from the post but added new stuff. As I told, it was a list of 21 tips and I made it to 50.
**Part 2: **Tomorrow, I checked my post URL through OSE and AHREF and I was wondered to see that someone copied my content on his website, and it was like copy paste. Text, Images, everything. From his blog, post images were linking to my site and some of the internal links. The first thing came to my mind that my ranking is dropped due to this thing. And, I spend next 3 hours to contact that person and fortunately, he was guilty and he deleted that page from his site.
Important Points:
- He copied my content on 7th Mar from OLD POST.
- I updated my blog post on 31 Mar.
- And, I lost my ranking on 1st Apr.
I have a strong gut feeling that this is just because of updating page not because of that content theft. What do you think Rob?
To your question:
I was ranking for 6-7 terms, mostly on the first page, and for 1-2 on #1, all lost.
Thanks again for your help.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Hello Puneet,
There are a few options here which may be in play:
- Rank Hopping
While rank trackers are typically pretty accurate, there can be a delay between crawling, indexing and ranking for your posts/pages. I have seen this myself with several clients in the last 2 weeks - there is a huge drop off in rankings for several days before they rebound and either return to normal or improve. This trend usually follows a round of link building or improving content, so it stands to reason that might be the cause here. I would give it another couple of days to determine if this might be what's happening in your case. (Typically my rankings have rebounded within 7 days or so)
- Outbound Links
A post is generally considered to be valuable when it provides information to visitors that they take in and provide signals of satisfaction for (low bounce, time on page, scroll % and so on). However, there can also be a technical risk in providing tons of outbound/internal links on a post that don't particularly improve the value of the content. For example, increasing the number of tips you have in your content - I don't know what the page looked like before you updated it, but you have effectively added 30 "internal" links to your content from the last update which limits the effectiveness of linkbuilding to the page itself. Google likes to see direct lines of thought and access and increasing the number of links on any particular page can have a negative impact on the rankings. In this case, it's a great UX addition, but it may be hurting you on the ranking front.
- Redirect
Any redirect will reduce the effectiveness of the links on a page. The estimates vary, but it is somewhere in the single-digit %'s. (i.e. somewhere between 3% and 10%). This means that you will reduce the impact of your link profile when you redirect and this may be influencing your post's overall rankability.
- Follow-Up Question Regarding Targeting
When you say that your rankings have dropped, do you mean for a single keyword or for multiple keywords?
If you are only tracking a single phrase or keyword, this sounds like a simple case of rank bouncing and you should expect it to return to normal pretty quickly.
If you are tracking multiple terms and they have all dropped off, this may signal a penalty, or, more likely, you have altered what Google believes the post is about and it has to reconsider the new content before assessing new rankings for new terms.
Overall, my bet is that it will return to its normal position in a couple of days. If not, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and I would be happy to help find a solution with you. In the meantime you might consider fleshing out your content with more succinct targeting, re-thinking your redirect, or reducing the number of internal links on your page. Personally I think it's a great post, so I doubt you will be stuck without rankings for long.
Cheers and don't hesitate to get in touch!
Rob
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Pages not indexable?
Hello, I've been trying to find out why Google Search Console finds these pages non-indexable: https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/eat-drink.html https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/florida-beaches/beach-finder.html Moz and SEMrush both crawl the pages and show no errors but GSC comes back with, "blocked by robots.txt" but I've confirmed it is not. Anyone have any thoughts? 6AYn1TL
Technical SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
My 'complete guide' is cannibalising my main product page and hurting rankings
Hi everyone, I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank. It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there. It works great and is getting lots of conversions. But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks. Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page. I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes. Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page. I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'. I've got the custom URL selected at the moment. There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex. If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hello, After crawling our site Moz is detecting high priority duplicate page content for our product and article listing pages, For example http://store.bmiresearch.com/bangladesh/power and http://store.bmiresearch.com/newzealand/power are being listed as duplicate pages although they have seperate URLs, page titles and H1 tags. They have the same product listed but I would have thought the differentiation in other areas would be sufficient for these to not be deemed as duplicate pages. Is it likely this issue will be impacting on our search rankings? If so are there any recommendations as to how this issue can be overcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
New page titles not updating in Google results even though recrawlled
I have updated the page title of a website - it's a top product page and very high authority (64 PA on a 63 DA). The page has been recrawlled and the cache updated - but the page tiltle in the Google snippet is still the same. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | OddDog0