Fresh content has had a negative affect on my SERPs
-
Hi there,
I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right?
Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory:
/health/flu/keyword-1
/health/flu/keyword-2 and so on...
I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content
- On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages
- Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords)
- More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords)
- More page visits (Via Adwords)
- Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages
So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing.
Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case)
If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
-
Hi Gary,
Not sure I can add anything not said here, but if you feel inclined to send me a PM with the URLs, I'd be more than happy to take a look at it.
-
Hi Cyrus,
I forgot to mention I put canonical and hreflang tags on both pages in question .co.uk & .ie and it now seems that Google has finally crawled the .ie page, unfortunately it's on Google.ie the keyword is no longer ranked, the good news is that When i paste the first paragraph of the .co.uk page into Google.co.uk it's the .co.uk page that appears not the .ie webpage.
Is there no way of the .ie version ranking at all in Google.ie? it seems a shame that Google cannot get this right.
Thanks
-
Hi Gary,
Good question. Could be a couple of things going on. Let me address each in turn.
1. Duplicate content and the Irish version of your site. Could be an issue if you're duplicating content, even with the hreflang tags. Google also recommends to use canonical tags on international versions in addition to hreflang tags if the the content is duplicated.
Good discussion here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.htmland here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN2. Fresh content. In general, fresh content will help your rankings. But there are a couple of things to look out for when updating your content.
- If the content changes significantly from the original, Google may interpret as contextually different, and alter it's ranking score.
- Same for title tags and other on-page factors. If these change too much from the original, Google may do a "reset" on the page, which basically says "this is an entirely new subject, so you have to earn your rankings again.
- Internal links. Sometimes our content ranks from the power of internal text links, and we can inadvertently change these when updating content. In the absence of strong external link signals, this effect can be strong.
If you kept your content, subject matter and internal links fairly consistent, there may be other factors at work, such as an algorythm update or the aforementioned dupe content issue.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Hi Aaron,
I have done very little in terms of link building for these pages, and the pages I have got back links on they are from authority websites, so it makes it very unlikely that this is the cause of the issue.
I just can't figure out what the issue could be, I mean for all pages in that directory to not be ranked anymore, it just seems to much of a coincidence that all the pages in this directory had been re-written, then one week later they vanish from the SERPs.
Any more suggestions would be very grateful.
-
It really sounds like a mistaken black-listing, if the ranking has dropped "all together". It could be based on content, but if your bounce rate is dropping, your content is better, and if there was a mistake made, I think some bad back-links are more likely.
If this occurred at the end of February, it would predate PENGUIN, but black-listings do occur between updates. One idea for resolving it would be to check some of the lower domain-authority backlinks, go to their site, and then from there, check other sites they are linking to, and see if those sites have also suffered. Once you target the location of the bad-links, you can start your clean up from there.
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
-
Volatile SERPS?
I have a new client whose rank is jumping around a lot. I took over the account 7 weeks ago, but they'd been doing SEO with a decent provider. They switched to me because they thought he wasn't working very hard and he's not very nice. I just took them on in December and they started out at #18. On Dec 24 they were at 9, Jan 1 at 12, Jan 2 at 14, Jan 3 at 24, Jan 12 at 19, Jan 15 at 28, Jan 16 at 25, Jan 19 at 28 and today at 24. Some of the really bad black hattish providers have bounced up to the top. Any idea what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Content question please help
Would content behind a drop down on this site Https://www.homeleisuredirect.com/pool_tables/english_pool_tables/ you have to click the - more about English pool tables text under the video Work just as well for SEO as content on the page like this site http://www.pooltablesonline.co.uk/uk-slate-bed-pool-tables.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?
Hi all, We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty. Here's a detailed information about our case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stj
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com. What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs. What are the other options?0 -
Product Syndication and duplicate content
Hi, It's a duplicate content question. We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow. For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id. Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
How to best handle expired content?
Similar to the eBay situation with "expired" content, what is the best way to approach this? Here are a few examples. With an e-commerce site, for a seasonal category of "Christmas" .. what's the best way to handle this category page after it's no longer valid? 404? 301? leave it as-is and date it by year? Another example. If I have an RSS feed of videos from a big provider, say Vevo, what happens when Vevo tells me to "expire" a video that it's no longer available? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
How to get head office address appear on SERPS under brand serps?
Hi all, We have different offices in UK in different cities. Until last month our main office was appearing on Google results but lately i noticed that our other office is appearing on serps when i search with brand name. We have 3 addresses registered with Google Places. Any ideas how we can get head office to appear on serps under our brand name? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Why duplicate content for same page?
Hi, My SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic warn me about duplicate content. However, to me the content is not duplicated. For instance it would give me something like: (URLs/Internal Links/External Links/Page Authority/Linking Root Domains) http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110516 /1/1/31/2 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110711 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110811 0/0/1/0 http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/contact?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20110911 0/0/1/0 Why is this seen as duplicate content when it is only URL with campaign tracking codes to the same content? Do I need to clean this?Thanks for answer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0