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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
How can a keyword placed on a page with the Moz page optimization score of 100 be ranked #51+?
Hi, Please help me figure out why this is happening and what goes wrong. This is the example of the poor ranked keyword - 'viking cooktop repair' with page optimization score of 100 (http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com/blog/viking-cooktop-repair/) Yet it's ranking is #51+. I've got many like these: Page Optimization Score for 'kitchenaid oven repair' is 100 (http://www.yourappliancerepairla.com/blog/kitchenaid-oven-repair/) yet its ranking is #51+ And so on. According to Google Search Console, I have 266 of links to my site with variety of root domains. While building backlinks, I paid attention to relevancy and DA.What else do I have to do to get those keywords ranked higher? And why don't they rank well if the pages are 100% optimized, not keywords stuffed and I have quality backlinks? What am I missing out on? Please help!
Technical SEO | | kirupa1 -
Ranking and Indexing Issue
We have an established site www.getinspired365.com that previously wasn't SEO optimised. We are currently in the process of testing out some new pages to see if we can get them to rank in Google, however we are seeing huge fluctuations in where they rank. Within the first few days we saw our page rank on the first or second page, however it has now dropped out of the top 250 search results. We are wondering if we have made any mistakes with our optimisation ? Example Page : Keyword to target - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special." URL : http://www.getinspired365.com/if-you-laugh-you-think-and-you-cry-thats-a-full-day-thats-a-heck-of-a-day-you-do-that-seven-days-a-week-youre-going-to-have-something-special We can see it has been indexed by Google but is now not ranking in the top 250 search engine results. We have run the On Page Grader from SEOMoz and it ranks the page as an "A" so we suspect that we are doing the SEO ok on the page, but can't work out why it isn't ranking, despite ranking on the first or second page after a few days ? We have other pages that aren't SEO optimised that rank better than our newly SEO optimised pages e.g. Keyword - "THE BEST LOVE IS THE KIND THAT AWAKENS THE SOUL AND MAKES US REACH FOR MORE, THAT PLANTS A FIRE IN OUR HEARTS AND BRINGS PEACE TO OUR MINDS. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME. THAT'S WHAT I'D HOPED TO GIVE YOU FOREVER" URL: http://www.getinspired365.com/20130528 Any advice you could offer would be great. Thanks ! Mike
Technical SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
No. of links on a page
Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
My site ranking
Hello, I have a website and working more than 1 year ago,I worked hard last year and paid alot to make guys write articles from my website to other forums so my keywords rank high and got good visitors, then I get in much care in SEO and found SEOMoz with is very nice,when I downloaded the tool bar it was a shock to find my website is almost zero although the big effort I had, I can do more but I need to guide what I exactly need to improve my website,I almost read alot of the beginner PDF and got good information to work with and can hire people to help too. I did a real big work sharing my subjects and i can see them in top#5 google but for other sites and now i found I am still zero 😞 adding my links inside also didnt help or counted. attached the statistics of the website and the competitors site to let me know which important things to take care to jump over. would be very thankful for detailed help, Best Regards 1_01308477251.png 1_01308477465.png
Technical SEO | | nesr_20200 -
Ads at the top of the page
hi mozzers, I have a website made in dreamweaver. Right at the very top of all of my pages is a text advert with a link to an affiliate in the ad. This link is very lucrative and gets a lot of sales, but i'm concerned it may have some negatives from an SEO perspective. As it's the first text on every page, i'm guessing bots will read it first. Could this potentially cause problems? If so, is there a best practice that would allow me to keep it there and keep the bots happy? Cheers, Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220