Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
-
Hello Team,
I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
-
Here in INDIA, it's on #1. I think it's recovering.
-
I see it ranked #7 for that term
-
Hey Rob,
Just go to google and type "Useful Macro Codes". Check if my page is there.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Hey Puneet,
Well, the update may have removed the canonical tag from your site with respect to the content, assuming you created a new URL for it to rest on. It just depends on how you went about making the change. If the page remains live but is simply redirecting to another with the update, you wouldn't lose the canonical reference to your content regardless of what someone else did in terms of putting it on their site.
Your post wouldn't lose rankings even if it was duplicated on another site - Google now only removes benefits from duplicating content, it doesn't penalize you for it.
While it's annoying that someone would copy your content, I think that's a red herring here. Give it a couple of days and I bet it will come back with similar rankings to what you're familiar with - maybe even improved with the new content.
Keep in mind that the new page your content rests on does not have a link profile to speak of, whereas your old page had lots of time to build up user review information and links. In effect, Google thinks it is looking at a brand new page, not a revision of a previous one. It will take time to recover rankings (a couple of days) but it will happen.
Last thing I hadn't considered - April 1 there was a renewed rollout of the Penguin algorithm - is it possible that there are some spammy links pointing to this page that might be influencing its rankings? I had a couple of clients that saw similar drops on April 1st but they are rebounding now.
All the best,
Rob
-
Yup James, you are right. I think the only weapon I have is Patience.
Thanks again for the help, James.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Thanks for the valuable stuff, Rob. You are like a Guardian Angel.
But, I have skipped a big part of this whole story, I'm sorry for that. So, let me come again.
**Part 1: **On 31st Mar, I have updated one of my old posts and redirected it to a new one. On 4th Apr, when I checked, my post was nowhere in the SERP. But it was indexed. I didn't change any content from the post but added new stuff. As I told, it was a list of 21 tips and I made it to 50.
**Part 2: **Tomorrow, I checked my post URL through OSE and AHREF and I was wondered to see that someone copied my content on his website, and it was like copy paste. Text, Images, everything. From his blog, post images were linking to my site and some of the internal links. The first thing came to my mind that my ranking is dropped due to this thing. And, I spend next 3 hours to contact that person and fortunately, he was guilty and he deleted that page from his site.
Important Points:
- He copied my content on 7th Mar from OLD POST.
- I updated my blog post on 31 Mar.
- And, I lost my ranking on 1st Apr.
I have a strong gut feeling that this is just because of updating page not because of that content theft. What do you think Rob?
To your question:
I was ranking for 6-7 terms, mostly on the first page, and for 1-2 on #1, all lost.
Thanks again for your help.
With love and respect,
Puneet Gogia
-
Hello Puneet,
There are a few options here which may be in play:
- Rank Hopping
While rank trackers are typically pretty accurate, there can be a delay between crawling, indexing and ranking for your posts/pages. I have seen this myself with several clients in the last 2 weeks - there is a huge drop off in rankings for several days before they rebound and either return to normal or improve. This trend usually follows a round of link building or improving content, so it stands to reason that might be the cause here. I would give it another couple of days to determine if this might be what's happening in your case. (Typically my rankings have rebounded within 7 days or so)
- Outbound Links
A post is generally considered to be valuable when it provides information to visitors that they take in and provide signals of satisfaction for (low bounce, time on page, scroll % and so on). However, there can also be a technical risk in providing tons of outbound/internal links on a post that don't particularly improve the value of the content. For example, increasing the number of tips you have in your content - I don't know what the page looked like before you updated it, but you have effectively added 30 "internal" links to your content from the last update which limits the effectiveness of linkbuilding to the page itself. Google likes to see direct lines of thought and access and increasing the number of links on any particular page can have a negative impact on the rankings. In this case, it's a great UX addition, but it may be hurting you on the ranking front.
- Redirect
Any redirect will reduce the effectiveness of the links on a page. The estimates vary, but it is somewhere in the single-digit %'s. (i.e. somewhere between 3% and 10%). This means that you will reduce the impact of your link profile when you redirect and this may be influencing your post's overall rankability.
- Follow-Up Question Regarding Targeting
When you say that your rankings have dropped, do you mean for a single keyword or for multiple keywords?
If you are only tracking a single phrase or keyword, this sounds like a simple case of rank bouncing and you should expect it to return to normal pretty quickly.
If you are tracking multiple terms and they have all dropped off, this may signal a penalty, or, more likely, you have altered what Google believes the post is about and it has to reconsider the new content before assessing new rankings for new terms.
Overall, my bet is that it will return to its normal position in a couple of days. If not, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me and I would be happy to help find a solution with you. In the meantime you might consider fleshing out your content with more succinct targeting, re-thinking your redirect, or reducing the number of internal links on your page. Personally I think it's a great post, so I doubt you will be stuck without rankings for long.
Cheers and don't hesitate to get in touch!
Rob
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
-
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
On-Page Problem
Hello Mozzers, A friend has a business website and the on-page stuff is done really bad. He wants to rank for: conference room furnishing, video conference, digital signage. (Don't worry about the keywords, it's just made up for an example.) For these three services he has a page: hiswebsite.com/av AV stands for audio and video and is the h1. If you click on one of the service, the url doesn't change. Like if you click on video conference, just the text changes, the url stays /av. All his targeted pages got an F Grade, I am not surprised, the services titles are in . Wouldn't it be a lot better to make an own page for every service with a targeted keyword, like hiswebsite.com/video-conference All this stuff is on /av, how will a 301 resirect work to all the service pages, does this make sense? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | grobro1 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Searching on root domain words = ranking on > page 10 in SERP
Hello, Our website wingmancondoms.com (a new condom brand) is not ranking in Google on the keywords "wingman condom", and I don't know why. In Yahoo and Bing everything is allright. I saw on this forum that it is maybe best to change my language URL's to wingmancondoms.com/nl /de and /fr instead of a direct URL like http://www.wingmancondoms.com/wingman-kondome (german translation). But is this our problem or are there more problems. Google is indexing our page well, no errors etc. Any other possibilities?
Technical SEO | | jogo0 -
Sudden decline in ranking
Hi SEO People, Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months. Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site. All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
Technical SEO | | chris.elevate0 -
132 pages reported as having Duplicate Page Content but I'm not sure where to go to fix the problems?
I am seeing “Duplicate Page Content” coming up in our
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
reports on SEOMOZ.org Here’s an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-ppa-r35-e http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/aphex-230-master-voice-channel-processor http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/AT-AE4100.prod These three pages are for completely unrelated products.
They are returning “200” status codes, but are being identified as having
duplicate page content. It appears these are all going to the home page, but it’s
an odd version of the home page because there’s no title. I would understand if these pages 301-redirected to the home page if they were obsolete products, but it's not a 301-redirect. The referring page is
listed as: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators None of the 3 links in question appear anywhere on that page. It's puzzling. We have 132 of these. Can anyone help me figure out
why this is happening and how best to fix it? Thanks!0 -
Dynamic page
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.0 -
Discrepency between # of pages and # of pages indexed
Here is some background: The site in question has approximately 10,000 pages and Google Webmaster shows that 10,000 urls(pages were submitted) 2) Only 5,500 pages appear in the Google index 3) Webmaster shows that approximately 200 pages could not be crawled for various reasons 4) SEOMOZ shows about 1,000 pages that have long URL's or Page Titles (which we are correcting) 5) No other errors are being reported in either Webmaster or SEO MOZ 6) This is a new site launched six weeks ago. Within two weeks of launching, Google had indexed all 10,000 pages and showed 9,800 in the index but over the last few weeks, the number of pages in the index kept dropping until it reached 5,500 where it has been stable for two weeks. Any ideas of what the issue might be? Also, is there a way to download all of the pages that are being included in that index as this might help troubleshoot?
Technical SEO | | Mont0