Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?
-
Hello,
I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it.
I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites.
I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article.
Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?
-
thanks very much. Heavily agreed upon with those social shares. Very hard to get those however!
-
As long as you wrote the article first, Google will know! It won't penalize you bcz people stole it.
A suggestion for the URL:blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
I would change this to: blog/marketing-budget-for-your-smb/index.html
I would keep the article title the same!
-
Also, try and get more social shares! I noticed your competitors articles got tweeted almost 100 times! These social signal will help you.
-
I am currently showing you in position #9 for that term. I took your content, did a word count and counted how many times 'marketing budget' was used. in the article you used it 8 times within a 969 word article. Your big competitor (INC) used the term 5 times inside a 1,162 word article. #1 position is INC.com followed by, Microsoft, About, Wiki.. These are all big players in the Google rankings and hard to compete with.
Due to the nature and competition of this keyword I am not going to suggest re writing.. I would setup a few more pages, with similar content about marketing budgets.. maybe not only for small businesses but for big ones, maybe tone down the use of the keyword, add some variations to it! Make about 2-3 new articles like this.
Track these new articles. They should have different titles, number & variations of keywords, URL's. Take note on which performs better than the others. After some time has passed.. take your better article and make those subtle changes to your article. Maybe change up some of the keywords, improve the URL and maybe put your keyword closer to the beginning of your page title.
(I do not want you to make these changes to your current article yet). I am not sure how it will affect it's ranking.
When you get your articles tracked and they start to improve on rankings, go ahead and link to your already ranking article from the new ones.
Hopefully over time you will be able to get back into the top 3!
-
http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
its up to number 7. We updated it in April of this year to bring it current and added some new changes. This post BTW has been featured in a NYT best selling business book.
-
its not a rewrite by the way. It's the original article. wondering if OTHERS that have rewritten it could be one of the reasons
-
marketing budget
we used to rank 3-5 on this term, got many of our visitors from it. It still ranks number one for setting a marketing budget.
Here is the link
http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
-
A rewrite wouldn't be a bad Idea, being that it is from two years ago. Are the websites that out rank you have fresh content? Google likes fresh and this could be a reason why you dropped. If you could screen shot the article and upload it to imgur.com or just provide me a URL I would like to look at the piece of content, maybe I can give you a reasonable cause as to why it dropped.. also a search term would be nice too!
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
-
Weird Indexing Issues with the Pages and Rankings
When I found the my page was non-existent on the search results page, I requested Google to index my page via the Search Console. And then just a few minutes after I did that, that page rose to top 3 ranking on the search page (with the same keyword and browser search). It happens to most of the pages on my website. Maybe a week later the rankings sank again, and I had to do the process again to make my pages to the top. Any reasons to explain this phenomenon, and how I can fix this issue? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrmrsteven0 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
Optimized Page Not Ranking for Head Term
We have a primary donation page that we've tried to position well for the term 'Donate' and some of its longer-tailed derivatives. The page has plenty of high-quality backlinks and internal links, and hasn't had any manual actions taken against it. The backlink profile is fairly good from what I can tell, definitely not mainly spam. The issue is that it doesn't rank for 'Donate', at all really. For 'Donate Online' and 'Donate Canada', it ranks roughly #3-4 across major Canadian cities, but we're not even in the top 100 for 'Donate'. There are pages and domains that are way less optimized, with much weaker backlink profiles, that are ranking well ahead of us. It's not a noindex or robots problem, as the page ranks fine for many other terms. We also have a strong domain with around 660k backlinks according to MajesticSEO. Here's the URL in question: http://www.redcross.ca/donate I'm hoping someone can help us diagnose what could be going wrong with this term specifically and how we can get this page into the SERPs where it belongs. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000 -
Best ways to build up Page Rank (PR)
What are your sure fire ways to build up page rank, quickly and effectively for long term gains. Do you have a check list?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | therealmarkhall0 -
Why does this site rank on the 1st page
i dont mean to be calling any site out im just scratching my head on this one.- I can't see any signal that would make it worthy of ranking on the first page for keyword loose diamonds. page http://www.jewelryexchange.com/DiamondResults.aspx Am i missing something all tools seem to say the site isn't worthy- All help appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0