Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
-
Hello,
I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings.
However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings
Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
-
"Query deserves freshness!"
Also, changing an entire paragraph content instead of only a few sentences to the current old content on a page can make a lot of difference.
Make sure you keep in mind the keyword to which the page is optimized for and don't go overboard and over-optimize the page. This will affect you really bad in the long run and you'll observe that the ranking goes down.
-
"Query deserves freshness!"
Also, changing an entire paragraph content instead of only a few sentences to the current old content on a page can make a lot of difference.
Make sure you keep in mind the keyword to which the page is optimized for and don't go overboard and over-optimize the page. This will affect you really bad in the long run and you'll observe that the ranking goes down.
-
Ok that is good to know, I will wait and see if this is what happens.
Thank you,
-
I have seen on multiple occasion right after a new page is indexed in Google, immediately skyrockets to the first page ( or close) depending on keyword. Then, a week later, it is ranked in the 40s, and for weeks after that starts the stock market-esq climb. Up, down, up, down, and hopefully towards a positive trend line.
-
Thank you for the information.
-
There could be many reasons for this. It all depends on the changes you are making to the pages!
If you make changes that improve the pages content there would be no real reason for you to drop.
If you had a page ranking for "SEO" and then you changed the content so the keyword "SEO" was no longer included but "website optimisation" was.. are you saying it would take longer for you to rank for "website optimisation" then if you just set up a new page? If this is the case, then it makes sense! If the keywords you want to be found for change, I would create a new page and if you are worried about duplicate content - then 301 the old page to the new one.
However, if you still want to be found for "SEO" and you are simply making changes to the content, as long as you add good informative content that still includes your keyword you shouldn't see any major drop.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Ranking Page - Category vs. Blog Post - What is best for CTR?
Hi, I am not sure wether I shall rank with a category page, or create a new post. Let me explain... If I google for 'Basic SEO' I see an article from Rand with Authorship markup. That's cool so I can go straight to this result because I know there might be some good insight. BUT: 'Basic SEO' is also an category at MOZ an it is not ranking. On the other hand, if I google for 'advanced SEO' then the MOZ category for 'advanced SEO' is ranking. But there is no authorship image, so users are much less likely to click on that result. Now, I want to rank for a very important keyword for me (content keyword, not transactional). Therefor, I have a category called 'yoga exercises'. But shall I rather create an post about them only to increase CTR due to Google Authorship? I read in Google guidelines that Authorship on homepage an category pages are not appreciated. Hope you have some insights that can help me out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0