Page Over-optimized?
-
I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site?
Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer
The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term.
During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem?
Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop?
Thanks,
BJ
-
Awesome..thanks for the actionable items, I'll jump into them & see what I can find. Thanks!
-
On the html, I personally just checked your source. I also use a Firefox extension that auto-validates it while I look at it which is great for an eyeball. You can find it here http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
On Panda, it's run on a regularish basis, often with a change to the algorithm, so it is possible your page was re-classified.
As for on-page ads, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots, this article points out the the crawlers take into account above the fold content, and are rendering the page to determine this.
My greatest suspicion would still be that you lost some kind of freshness boost, especially as it's a page detailing an offer. Or alternatively lost a few very powerful links to the offer (knocked off the page of a list of offers e.t.c.)
Also on the ad, I'm with everyone else in surprise that putting up that ad didn't massively increase your bounce rate of the page and reduce the conversion rate of the page for the offer (as opposed to the e-book). There was an article recently pointing out that Google may (as in it's the subject of debate) be taking bounce rate into account, though that would only explain why it's not recovering as opposed to the initial drop if you ran the ad after the drop.
Generaly, you would expect your first time visitors to be leaving the site and never returning when you use such an ad, which could trigger such issue. One such article is here -> http://www.searchenginejournal.com/actual-bounce-rate-vs-bounce-rate-and-why-the-difference-matters-for-seo/31852/
I would try improving the pages html, fatten up the content somewhat and disable the ad for the page, then wait a couple months to see if there is any change. If not then it at the very least rules out the most likly culprits.
Other avenues you can explore are to investigate other sitewide changes, see if you can check historical link data for the page to check if you lost any powerful links, and to ensure your not just being legitimatly reduced in rankings by better competitor pages.
-
If you have done your homework, then so be it, but i am surprised.
-
Of course it does...we have people coming to the site looking for coupons. Our popup is a free eBook on how to save money using coupons. It doesn't popup every time, only for first time visitors.
Do we get 100% of the people submitting an email..of course not. Does anyone get annoyed, of course. Do we get higher conversion rates than without out..of course. That's why we use it!
If we judged everything by the cover, we'd never get anywhere. All the decision made on a site, need to be tested & measured. Hence what I was asking above in the article. If someone had data & ran some tests to suggest that a popup would have an effect on a popup, then that would be helpful information to have as I'm trying to address the drop in rankings.
-
I am suprised that it works, but then not everybody thinks like me.
-
K, thats a good opinion, but not the question at hand. I understand that it turns off some visitors, but we do it because it works
If it was in some way affecting our SEO, we would look into other alternatives.
-
I am not saying rankings or traffic will drop, but it will turn people off. it turns me off, people do not ask for a pop up, so it is a turn off when you get one.
but honestly, i thought it would be obvious to everone that blocking someones screen with a pop up is annoying, i didnt think you would need an article on it.
-
Actually I just pulled up my notes to find out when we added the popup to the site & it was on May 19th, which would have came after the traffic had dropped for these pages.
-
Hmm...you're the second person to question the popup promoting our eBook. Can you provide any articles that discuss how this would affect our Organic rankings? Could this really cause that much of an issue?
If I turned it off & waited to see how long it would take to get better search results, how long do you think I would need to wait to see results? I'd be fine running a test on this. At the moment, we do get a good amount of subscribers, so it would be a loss if we lost it.
-
This page http://onefrugalchick.com/2011/03/22/free-mio-drink-mix-sample-new-product/ ranks higher for the term & was posted around the same time as ours. So I'm not sure if it would just have been a freshness boost?
What tool are you using to crawl this page to find all the html errors? That would be helpful to find them & to start fixing them.
Do you have any resources/articles you could send about a page having an issue because a popup promoting the site? I'd be curious to look into this to see if there could be any issues.
Thin Content: This was my original impression, but after the Panda update we stuck around for at least 2 months, before anything happened. I wouldn't have suspected an update like that to take this long, so I'm suspicious about it being something else? Do you know if it could have delayed by two months?
-
Thanks for the response! I have tracked the backlinks & haven't seen any major drops overall? Is there any tools available that would show an overall link count for a particular site overtime? Also I wouldn't say this was a competitor move, as much as something happening on our site.
-
Your page is either otimised, or it is not, it may be at its optimum, but it cant be over the optimum.
unless you have keywords stuffed it and gone un-natural i would not worry.
I would be more worried about the delayed pop up you have, it would seem to me you are trying to show one thing to google and anouther to everyone else. It would also send users away. I would simply go to the next site in the search after seeing that.
-
Theres a few possable things here.
First the page might have recived a 'freshness' boost, as it is an offer. Which would explain an excellent ranking with few links.
The page also has a /lot/ of html errors which could cause serch engines to misintuprate the page if their bad enough.
The overlay ad might be seen as spammy, and the content could be seen as thin.
As for over optimisation, it seems within tollerance to me, but theres to meny on and off page issues to be sure.
-
Unfortunately, it's going to be difficult to tell what the problem is just by eye balling the site. Hopefully these questions will give you a starting point.
Have you checked your back links to make sure your site still has strong link juice coming in or any at all?
Was there any competitors who recently entered your target market that might have pushed you down?
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Handling Pages with query codes
In Moz my client's site is getting loads of error messages for no follow tags on pages. This is down to the query codes on the E-commerce site so the URLs can look like this https://www.lovebombcushions.co.uk/?bskt=31d49bd1-c21a-4efa-a9d6-08322bf195af Clearly I just want the URL before the ? to be crawled but what can I do in the site to ensure that these errors for nofollow are removed? Is there something I should do in the site to fix this? In the back of my mind I'm thinking rel-conanical tag but I'm not sure. Can you help please?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist1 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Duplicate Page Content but where?
Hi All Moz is telling me I have duplicate page content and sure enough the PA MR mT are all 0 but it doesnt give me a link to this content! This is the page: http://www.orsgroup.com/index.php?page=Scanning-services But I cant find where the duplicate content is other than on our own youtube page which I will get removed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnjh9jkAWuA Can anyone help please? Andy
Technical SEO | | ORS-Group0 -
Home page URL
Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
Why is my office page not being indexed?
Good Morning from 24 degrees C partly cloudy wetherby UK 🙂 This page is not being indexed by Google:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let-leeds/ 1st Question Ive checked robots txt file no problems, i'm in the midst of updating the xml sitemap (it had the old one in place). It only has one link from this page http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/Site-Map/ So is the reason oits not being indexed just a simple case of lack if SEO juice from inbound links so the remedy lies in routing more inbound links to the offending page? 2nd question Is the quickest way to diagnose if a web address is not being indexed to cut and paste the url in the Google search box and if it doesnt return the page theres a problem? Thanks in advance, David0 -
404 - page authority?
If in open site explorer my 404 pages have a higer page authority - what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page. For example www.site.com/widget is a 404 but has authority according to open site explorer - but the page i see in the serps is www.site.com/widget/ with the / at the end. so what benefit would i see in rankings if I 301 redirected those pages to the right page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610