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Ranking dropped after change single page url, should I change it back?
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I was making updates to the content on the following page, and a few days later dropped from #2 SERP ranking to 50+.
Things I checked:
Yes, 301 redirect was implemented right away.
After publishing, I manually requested indexing in search console.
Right after publishing I re-submitted the sitemap manually and Google said they had not crawled it in 9 days.
My question: should I change the URL back to the old one, or give it a little more time (especially since I re-submitted sitemap)
Original URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/
New URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical-insurance/
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Thanks Boyd for such a detailed reply. This is all very helpful information!
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Well essentially there were 3 major changes that happened at the same time (in Google's eyes): the url change, overhauling your content, and getting rid of the site-wide link from your navigation.
I know you said that the navigation link drop happened a month ago, but you have to remember that no change on your website affects your rankings for good or bad until Google comes back and crawls your page(s) and sees the change.
Some of your main pages probably were crawled within a few days of the navigation change but the majority of pages weren't re-crawled for a few weeks after that change. I can still find some of your pages that haven't been crawled since before the navigation change.
Now, I don't think that the content change is what's hurting you because you added more useful content. Although maybe you have over optimized it a bit for "travel medical insurance" since that exact phrase shows up 48 times.
URL changes with proper 301 redirect implementation can drop your rankings temporarily but my experience has always been to gain back the temporary loss soonish afterwards.
If it were my site, I'd do the following:
- Immediately put back the link pointing to that page in the navigation with the same anchor text it had before
- Wait about two to three weeks after that to see if any ranking recovery has happened
- If no change, I'd drop that exact match phrase several times from the article (then wait for it to be recrawled to assess if it helped or not)
- Then if no change still, I'd test changing the content back to the old page keeping the new URL
- Then if no change still, I'd change the redirect back
My hope is that you'll recover the rankings after just putting the navigation link back.
Good luck
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There are many factors that affect on dropping in ranking. It happened with me also once upon a time, Here is strategy applied by me:
Left new url for 7 days.
Did not update or replace url in those 7 days.
I saw improvement in ranking and yes, my new ranking was better than previous one. SEO is game of patience. Have that with you
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Thanks Boyd, below are thee clarifications:
- For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"
Yes
- How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.
Significant content changes including adding clarifying topics (header and content), added images, added a FAQ section, added outbound link to authority sources.
- Did you change the title tag?
No
- Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link to link in the navigation to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I didn't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?
No, the main navigation change (removing the Plans dropdown) happened about 1 month ago (end of Jan)
- Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?
No
Thanks very much for whatever insight you can provide, much appreciated and let me know if you need anything else.
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Some clarifying questions:
- For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"
- How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.
- Did you change the title tag?
- Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link pointing to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I don't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?
- Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?
Right now I am seeing that Google has recrawled the new page and has recognized the 301 redirect because when you do a "site:https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/" search, Google lists the new URL in the results and the cached version's most recent date is 2/24/20 at 21:21:18 GMT.
I wouldn't change the redirect back just yet. But I need answers to the above questions before giving you my final opinion.
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