How to retain those rankings gained from fresh content...
-
Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.
So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.
So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?
We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.
Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.
-
No worries
We release property every week and I do a blog post about each one, probably 2-5 properties each week then smash it out via social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc). This seems to work quite nicely, though I only have to sell it once to be fair.
After this, we will also email the property out (with new content from that week), this gives that page a massive boost in traffic, which definitely slows down the process of dropping off the rankings, in my opinion.
So perhaps do a weekly email about new products and include some relative content in the email as well (as Matt said, link to the products in the content too!)
Doing this I have been steadily climbing up the rankings for my main keyword, last week I went up 15 ranks according to SEOmoz Pro! (It’s been about a month or two since I started doing this).
I think my main problem is that the site has a lot of old pages. Also the main pages need a bit of on-page optimization, so this may be something to look at as well J
-
Thanks Matt,
Some very helpful feed back, this is exactly what we want to do as we know some of these search terms will be there for the long haul as they are related to some major products which we know will be popular until the eventual update/replacement.
-
Jeff,
Thanks for the response. Both articles are exceptionally helpful.
Reading between the lines the decay is natural, especially when related to new terms being launched.
My challenge is to slow/prevent this decay from rankings, most of the terms I want to maintain are for new products which will be around for a while much like the releated terms. Ideally I would plant the flag early and defend my SERPS to the very last slot above the fold.
I like your strategy however, continued postings every week when a new product comes out to ensure we can maintain position.
-
I have found to some extent that this is natural, however in order to combat this with one of the sites that I work on we have made sure that the exposure, especially through social media has been staggered, not hitting everything at once, so that it has been clear to search engines that the fresh content is still important in relation to the terms that it is ranking for. I have also produced content related to this in the form of a series clearly linking to the original so that every time one of the pieces of new content get traffic, links and social recognition so does the original piece showing that it still has relevance in the current rankings. I have found this has worked and we have kept pieces ranking like this.
-
Good question!
Google will boost the ranking of new content posted for a small amount of time because of this"freshness update".
It was explained really well by these legands http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday.
Also check this out http://justinbriggs.org/methods-for-evaluating-freshness.
So in answer to your question (and I'm no "expert" so this is just my opinion) keep posting new content regularly to rank for those keywords where google are knocking you after 1-2 weeks, and see it as a way to drive traffic.
I don't know of any other way, maybe someone can share some further insights
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
-
Is "Author Rank," User Comments Driving Losses for YMYL Sites?
Hi, folks! So, our company publishes 50+ active, disease-specific news and perspectives websites -- mostly for rare diseases. We are also tenacious content creators: between news, columns, resource pages, and other content, we produce 1K+ pieces of original content across our network. Authors are either PhD scientists or patients/caregivers. All of our sites use the same design. We were big winners with the August Medic update in 2018 and subsequent update in September/October. However, the Medic update in March and de-indexing bug in April were huge losers for us across our monetized sites (about 10 in total). We've seen some recovery with this early June update, but also some further losses. It's a mixed bag. Take a look at this attached MOZ chart, which shows the jumps and falls around the various Medic updates. The pattern is very similar on many of our sites. As per JT Williamson's stellar article on EAT, I feel like we've done a good job in meeting those criteria, which has left we wondering what isn't jiving with the new core updates. I have two theories I wanted to run past you all: 1. Are user comments on YMYL sites problematic for Google now? I was thinking that maybe user comments underneath health news and perspectives articles might be concerning on YMYL sites now. On one hand, a healthy commenting community indicates an engaged user base and speaks to the trust and authority of the content. On the other hand, while the AUTHOR of the article might be a PhD researcher or a patient advocate, the people commenting -- how qualified are they? What if they are spouting off crazy ideas? Could Google's new update see user comments such as these as degrading the trust/authority/expertise of the page? The examples I linked to above have a good number of user comments. Could these now be problematic? 2. Is Google "Author Rank" finally happening, sort of? From what I've read about EAT -- particularly for YMYL sites -- it's important that authors have “formal expertise” and, according to Williamson, "an expert in the field or topic." He continues that the author's expertise and authority, "is informed by relevant credentials, reviews, testimonials, etc. " Well -- how is Google substantiating this? We no longer have the authorship markup, but is the algorithm doing its due diligence on authors in some more sophisticated way? It makes me wonder if we're doing enough to present our author's credentials on our articles, for example. Take a look -- Magdalena is a PhD researcher, but her user profile doesn't appear at the bottom of the article, and if you click on her name, it just takes you to her author category page (how WordPress'ish). Even worse -- our resource pages don't even list the author. Anyhow, I'd love to get some feedback from the community on these ideas. I know that Google has said there's nothing to do to "fix" these downturns, but it'd sure be nice to get some of this traffic back! Thanks! 243rn10.png
Algorithm Updates | | Michael_Nace1 -
Sub-domain with spammy content and links: Any impact on main website rankings?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains is forums. Our users will be discussing about our product and many related things. But some of the users in forum are adding a lot of spammy content everyday. I just wonder whether this scenario is ruining our ranking efforts of main website? A sub domain with spammy content really kills the ranking of main website? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking drop after sub domain to sub directory migration. Usual?
Hi all, We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does cached duplicate content hurts seo by Google
If we have duplicate content or pages cached in Google which has been indexed months back, still it hurts the original pages? Old URLs with cache can be seen now in Google when we search for the same URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking dropped with no page changes
My rank for a keyword went from ranking #1 to #22. The page grade for this keyword is A, there was no site structure changes. The only thing I can see is that tumblr and reddit and other sources are now listed for this keyword and it's difficulty went from the mid-low teens to 28%. However, even given that, I do not a see a reason for this keyword alone to fall so far. It was giving us a ton of traffic, in fact, most of our organic search results came from this term for nearly two months. And 2 weeks ago for no reason, we were pushed to page 3. Has anyone else had similar experiences how do you counter it, and what can we do?
Algorithm Updates | | mozmemberanon0 -
How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?
Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50500 -
Is there a utility that can tell me what keywords my site already ranks high for?
Ok... so I'm looking for a way to understand what my site already ranks high for.. I don't necessarily want to have to manually type in keywords. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to a client what keywords they're already ranking high for. Is there an easy way / tool to go about doing this? Thanks in advance, Gene
Algorithm Updates | | BGroup0