Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?
-
Hello,
I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it.
I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites.
I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article.
Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?
-
thanks very much. Heavily agreed upon with those social shares. Very hard to get those however!
-
As long as you wrote the article first, Google will know! It won't penalize you bcz people stole it.
A suggestion for the URL:blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
I would change this to: blog/marketing-budget-for-your-smb/index.html
I would keep the article title the same!
-
Also, try and get more social shares! I noticed your competitors articles got tweeted almost 100 times! These social signal will help you.
-
I am currently showing you in position #9 for that term. I took your content, did a word count and counted how many times 'marketing budget' was used. in the article you used it 8 times within a 969 word article. Your big competitor (INC) used the term 5 times inside a 1,162 word article. #1 position is INC.com followed by, Microsoft, About, Wiki.. These are all big players in the Google rankings and hard to compete with.
Due to the nature and competition of this keyword I am not going to suggest re writing.. I would setup a few more pages, with similar content about marketing budgets.. maybe not only for small businesses but for big ones, maybe tone down the use of the keyword, add some variations to it! Make about 2-3 new articles like this.
Track these new articles. They should have different titles, number & variations of keywords, URL's. Take note on which performs better than the others. After some time has passed.. take your better article and make those subtle changes to your article. Maybe change up some of the keywords, improve the URL and maybe put your keyword closer to the beginning of your page title.
(I do not want you to make these changes to your current article yet). I am not sure how it will affect it's ranking.
When you get your articles tracked and they start to improve on rankings, go ahead and link to your already ranking article from the new ones.
Hopefully over time you will be able to get back into the top 3!
-
http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
its up to number 7. We updated it in April of this year to bring it current and added some new changes. This post BTW has been featured in a NYT best selling business book.
-
its not a rewrite by the way. It's the original article. wondering if OTHERS that have rewritten it could be one of the reasons
-
marketing budget
we used to rank 3-5 on this term, got many of our visitors from it. It still ranks number one for setting a marketing budget.
Here is the link
http://www.imageworksstudio.com/blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
-
A rewrite wouldn't be a bad Idea, being that it is from two years ago. Are the websites that out rank you have fresh content? Google likes fresh and this could be a reason why you dropped. If you could screen shot the article and upload it to imgur.com or just provide me a URL I would like to look at the piece of content, maybe I can give you a reasonable cause as to why it dropped.. also a search term would be nice too!
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, because I rank 7-12 in search results
Hi All, Pls check the below url http://www.powerwale.com/inverter-battery for inverter battery keyword in google.co.in im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, and also I still rank in between 7 to 12 in search results.. How can be in Top 3 search results.. Pls suggest.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1191 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction. For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while. Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing. Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank. Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank. I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail. I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff. What am I not seeing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Can changing dynamic url of over 2000 pages site after a year will change its ranking
Hi- Have built site in joomla The urls are dynamic in nature with over a year - all pages are well indexed and backlinks been built over with these dynamic urls Need to know if i hire an agency to change over dynamic url to static url of these 2000 pages - will it also change all Search engine ranking positions of existing urls Will all the seo effort and backlinks build over 15 months will still hold valid or this will just back to square one due to change of urls is it advisable to get the url changed from dynamic to static one - especially when site is receiving over 75,000 visitors every month Thanks in advance. Look for expert suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Sudden and Aggressive Fall in Rankings
I have seen a sudden and aggressive drop in rankings for my site. The site was ranking #4 for rental insurance and now sits at #9. It was ranking #16 for renters insurance and now dropped to #171. We vary anchor text in our link building campaign and focus on getting links from PR3+ sites as well as produce content for quality sites in exchange for being a featured author + link. The site has not been over optimized (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.). I would appreciate any insight into what could be causing this significant drop in rankings and what my course of action is to reinstate my rankings - Penguin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0