Dropped 50 places for Page Title Change
-
Hey Guys,
I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50.
After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will.
I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending.
I changed the title;
from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"
to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"
This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do.
I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1?
Thanks,
Adam
-
Just wondering how you are making out with this. I checked Google US and didn't see you rank in the top 50. Curious to hear an update. Hope its going well.
-
What do think about the large amount of words in the image alt tags? I am just curious. I cant help but think it may look a bit spammy. Am I wrong?
-
I think that's it then! Ha that is a weight of my mind, now I have a reason I can create a solution. I just checked my Webmaster Tools data and we went from a stable level of 3000 impressions on the 24th July going straight down to 1000 impressions by the 28th July then picking up slightly and staying around the 1600 level ever since.
I checked the Panda update and they said ~1% have been affected but I've got a lot of duplicate page data on there. I'm going to push forward with a complete change to the text on the front page. Ahh that is a weight off knowing what the problem probably is. Whew....
Thanks for all the help guys its really really appreciated.
Adam
-
There have been several Panda updates since then. There was one on July 24th, 2012 so it's possible that this update picked up your potential Panda issues.
-
Bear in mind theres been alot of recent Google algo changes, your rankings may have changed because of something other than page titles.
BTW - I say that especially applies to the travel industry - ive seen alot of flux for aggregators of late.
-
Ahh I hadnt thought of that, the drop though was about shortly after I changed the title and requested a google reindex of the site. I wonder if the changes caused Google to push through a re-evaluation and penalised it based on the Panda update.
The Panda update was in Fed and my changes we the 19th July, so pretty far apart, but could still be linked.... hmm...
-
I'm guessing this is not really connected to your title change. On what date did you drop from the SERPS? Is it concidental with a known Panda Update?
The reason I am asking is that a quick look for duplicate content on your site, shows this: Google search for a phrase from the site in quotes : 2530 results!
If Google thinks your page is a duplicate of others out there then it has no reason to offer it up to searchers.
I didn't have a thorough look though, but I'm thinking that the drop is not directly related to your title change.
-
Yeah I might at that, just the fact that I'm not in the top 50 though is a very bad sign for the rest of my plan ....
-
Try to continue with your plan
I think Google doesn't have an "undo" button... When I'm optimizing the title I'm also changing the meta description to suit the new title, that way if Google doesn't find an appropriate part of text for the description, it will use the optimized one.
-
With this though its over a couple of months with multiple sources of confirmation. My total organic traffic in GA dropped 20% about a week after the change and my Webmaster tools impressions have halved as well.
Right now checking in multiple sources I'm not even in the top 50 since making a title change and then reversing which is very worrying...
-
I know changing the Alt tags and other on-page optimisation was part of my original plan. Change title, stabilise, change h1 tags, stabilise, change alt tags etc..
Unfortunately the title change bombed my placement, so before I make some more changes I'm trying to start from my initial position and move forward.
Just dont seem to be able to get back to before I set my plan in motion.
-
You need to remember that SEOmoz is constantly changing their ranking algorithm, just like Google is, I think that they have a place to track changes.
-
I lost rank on a product page for too many of the same type keywords. I scaled them back and ranking improved a few weeks later. A program I use indicated this :Your Image Alt attributes seem very long . The average wordcount per Alt tag is 8.8 . Possibly too high.
-
Thanks Leat, I know its odd. I think I've been penalized for spam like behaviour when I changed the title. I'm a little concerned as America is the main source of traffic.
-
Europe, Romania
-
Can i ask you where you are based?
-
I did a manual check and your website is ranking on the 10th position for the search "bahamas all inclusive" on google.com.
Your title in the search is "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation..."
Update: I've searched through an US proxy and the website is not even in top 50...strange!
-
Ahh no I'm not after that. I know the rank has dropped and I have had this confirmed in multiple places including webmaster tools and google analytics.
So the rank has dropped.
I need to increase the position for those keywords.
Adam
-
I would try rankchecker it spiders out to find your actual rank. Or Google the keywords and find your sites current rank. I believe SeoMoz does an update kind of like Semrush but not positive.
-
SEOMoz with Google US as the preferred search engine. Not too bothered about the others for now, as I'm hoping they'll fall in to place.... hopefully....
-
Can I ask what you are you using for your rank check?
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
-
Increase in duplicate page titles due to canonical tag issue
Implemented canonical tag (months back) in product pages to avoid duplicate content issue. But Google picks up the URL variations and increases duplicate page title errors in Search Console. Original URL: www.example.com/first-product-name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 1: www.example.com/first-product--name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 2: www.example.com/first-product-name-sync-123456 Canonical tag: Kindly advice the right solution to fix the issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDdigital0 -
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Best practice for the brand name in Page Titles
We are considering changing the way we treat our brand (TTS) in our page title tags. In MOZ I found the following advice: Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TTS_Group
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword Are these of equal merit or is the former (Primary keyword | Brand) the better route? Currently we use the second version - 'Brand | Primary Keyword' - but we are proposing to shift to 'Primary Keyword | Brand'. We currently get an awful lot of brand traffic that converts very well so I need to be sure that no harm is done as a minimum. All views appreciated. Many thanks. Jon0 -
Changing links after 301 already in place: is it nessasary?
Hi:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
I'm in the process of making sure I have a single URL that gets all link juice for every page. As the first step, I'm implementing 301 redirects. My question is: After 301 redirect is in place will it still be necessary to update links on my site(s) that point to the old URLs. For example, I just 301-redirected mysite.com/folder/index.html to mysite.com/folder/ - and it works fine, but I still have many links on the same site and other sites that link to mysite.com/folder/index.html. Is it important to change those links to mysite.com/folder/ as well or could I just leave them as they are since the 301 is taking care of the redirect anyway.. I mean, I will probably change them in time, just to keep things tidy. But if it's important I would definitely do it sooner rather than later. Thank you in advance.0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.
Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero0 -
How long till pages drop out of the index
In your experience how long does it normally take for 301-redirected pages to drop out of Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110