Page Over-optimized?
-
I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site?
Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer
The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term.
During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem?
Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop?
Thanks,
BJ
-
Awesome..thanks for the actionable items, I'll jump into them & see what I can find. Thanks!
-
On the html, I personally just checked your source. I also use a Firefox extension that auto-validates it while I look at it which is great for an eyeball. You can find it here http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
On Panda, it's run on a regularish basis, often with a change to the algorithm, so it is possible your page was re-classified.
As for on-page ads, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/just-how-smart-are-search-robots, this article points out the the crawlers take into account above the fold content, and are rendering the page to determine this.
My greatest suspicion would still be that you lost some kind of freshness boost, especially as it's a page detailing an offer. Or alternatively lost a few very powerful links to the offer (knocked off the page of a list of offers e.t.c.)
Also on the ad, I'm with everyone else in surprise that putting up that ad didn't massively increase your bounce rate of the page and reduce the conversion rate of the page for the offer (as opposed to the e-book). There was an article recently pointing out that Google may (as in it's the subject of debate) be taking bounce rate into account, though that would only explain why it's not recovering as opposed to the initial drop if you ran the ad after the drop.
Generaly, you would expect your first time visitors to be leaving the site and never returning when you use such an ad, which could trigger such issue. One such article is here -> http://www.searchenginejournal.com/actual-bounce-rate-vs-bounce-rate-and-why-the-difference-matters-for-seo/31852/
I would try improving the pages html, fatten up the content somewhat and disable the ad for the page, then wait a couple months to see if there is any change. If not then it at the very least rules out the most likly culprits.
Other avenues you can explore are to investigate other sitewide changes, see if you can check historical link data for the page to check if you lost any powerful links, and to ensure your not just being legitimatly reduced in rankings by better competitor pages.
-
If you have done your homework, then so be it, but i am surprised.
-
Of course it does...we have people coming to the site looking for coupons. Our popup is a free eBook on how to save money using coupons. It doesn't popup every time, only for first time visitors.
Do we get 100% of the people submitting an email..of course not. Does anyone get annoyed, of course. Do we get higher conversion rates than without out..of course. That's why we use it!
If we judged everything by the cover, we'd never get anywhere. All the decision made on a site, need to be tested & measured. Hence what I was asking above in the article. If someone had data & ran some tests to suggest that a popup would have an effect on a popup, then that would be helpful information to have as I'm trying to address the drop in rankings.
-
I am suprised that it works, but then not everybody thinks like me.
-
K, thats a good opinion, but not the question at hand. I understand that it turns off some visitors, but we do it because it works
If it was in some way affecting our SEO, we would look into other alternatives.
-
I am not saying rankings or traffic will drop, but it will turn people off. it turns me off, people do not ask for a pop up, so it is a turn off when you get one.
but honestly, i thought it would be obvious to everone that blocking someones screen with a pop up is annoying, i didnt think you would need an article on it.
-
Actually I just pulled up my notes to find out when we added the popup to the site & it was on May 19th, which would have came after the traffic had dropped for these pages.
-
Hmm...you're the second person to question the popup promoting our eBook. Can you provide any articles that discuss how this would affect our Organic rankings? Could this really cause that much of an issue?
If I turned it off & waited to see how long it would take to get better search results, how long do you think I would need to wait to see results? I'd be fine running a test on this. At the moment, we do get a good amount of subscribers, so it would be a loss if we lost it.
-
This page http://onefrugalchick.com/2011/03/22/free-mio-drink-mix-sample-new-product/ ranks higher for the term & was posted around the same time as ours. So I'm not sure if it would just have been a freshness boost?
What tool are you using to crawl this page to find all the html errors? That would be helpful to find them & to start fixing them.
Do you have any resources/articles you could send about a page having an issue because a popup promoting the site? I'd be curious to look into this to see if there could be any issues.
Thin Content: This was my original impression, but after the Panda update we stuck around for at least 2 months, before anything happened. I wouldn't have suspected an update like that to take this long, so I'm suspicious about it being something else? Do you know if it could have delayed by two months?
-
Thanks for the response! I have tracked the backlinks & haven't seen any major drops overall? Is there any tools available that would show an overall link count for a particular site overtime? Also I wouldn't say this was a competitor move, as much as something happening on our site.
-
Your page is either otimised, or it is not, it may be at its optimum, but it cant be over the optimum.
unless you have keywords stuffed it and gone un-natural i would not worry.
I would be more worried about the delayed pop up you have, it would seem to me you are trying to show one thing to google and anouther to everyone else. It would also send users away. I would simply go to the next site in the search after seeing that.
-
Theres a few possable things here.
First the page might have recived a 'freshness' boost, as it is an offer. Which would explain an excellent ranking with few links.
The page also has a /lot/ of html errors which could cause serch engines to misintuprate the page if their bad enough.
The overlay ad might be seen as spammy, and the content could be seen as thin.
As for over optimisation, it seems within tollerance to me, but theres to meny on and off page issues to be sure.
-
Unfortunately, it's going to be difficult to tell what the problem is just by eye balling the site. Hopefully these questions will give you a starting point.
Have you checked your back links to make sure your site still has strong link juice coming in or any at all?
Was there any competitors who recently entered your target market that might have pushed you down?
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
-
Why Dropping pages from SERPS?
Our website for my olansi company in London, China has hundreds of pages dedicated to every service we provide to China local areas. The total number of pages is approximately 100. Google caters pretty well for long-tail searches when it indexes all these pages, so we usually get a fair amount of traffic when this happens. However, Google occasionally drops most of our indexed pages from search engine results for a few days or weeks at a time - for example, Google is currently indexing 60 pages while last week it was back at 100. Can you tell me why this happens? When these pages don't display, we lose a lot of organic traffic. What are we doing wrong? Site url:https://www.olanside.com
Technical SEO | | sesahoda0 -
Wrong Page Ranking?!?
I did some research today, one of our keywords is "mobile column lifts." I recently redid a page on our website to target this keyword. When I Google search this keyword I see that a page on our site titled "Reconditioned Mobile Lifts" is ranking for this keyword. I took a look with Moz, our mobile column lifts page ranks 90 for the keyword, and the reconditioned lifts page ranks 73 the keyword. Why is this happening? How can I fix this? https://www.slec.com/mobile-column-lifts/ https://www.slec.com/reconditioned-mobile-lifts/
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
What is Too Many On-Page Links?
in campaigns i see " Too Many On-Page Links " what is this ? can anyone please tell me ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Duplicate page error
SEO Moz gives me an duplicate page error as my homepage www.monteverdetours.com is the same as www.monteverdetours.com/index is this actually en error? And is google penalizing me for this?
Technical SEO | | Llanero0 -
How to Find all the Pages Index by Google?
I'm planning on moving my online store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to a new platform, http://www.corecommerce.com/ To reduce the SEO impact, I want to redirect 301 all the pages index by Google to the new page I will create in the new platform. I will keep the same domaine name, but all the URL will be customize on the new platform for better SEO. Also, is there a way or tool to create CSV file from those page index. Can Webmaster tool help? You can read my question about this subject here, http://www.seomoz.org/q/impacts-on-moving-online-store-to-new-platform Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
What can be the cause of my inner pages ranking higher than my home page?
If you do a search for my own company name or products we sell the inner pages rank higher than the homepage and if you do a search for exact content from my home page my home page doesn't show in the results. My homepage shows when you do a site: search so not sure what is causing this.
Technical SEO | | deciph220