Lesser visited, but highly ranked landing paged dropped in rank on Google. Time for a content update?
-
I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week. This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell. The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side. Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one. This is a first for me. Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms. Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up? I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.
-
Yes, you replied to my post last week when my most important pages dropped a few spots to a new site. That's bound to happen, and a new site has hit #1. I'm talking about other landing pages that have dropped a whole page or two. These landing pages have ranked in the top five on page one for well over a year. I guess I was leaning towards a freshness issue because the sites that now rank on page one do have a freshness theme, aside from a few others that just kill everyone else with fantastic PA, DA, and inbound links.
-
There is a good blog post about freshness, dont panic is a good takaway, depending on your content it may not be a good idea to freshen up
-
Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one.
When I hear this the first thing that comes to my mind is a couple of hungry competitors or a single hungry competitor with two sites.
So, my question is.... Who is beating you today that was not beating you six months ago?
-
Would be cool to hear how things go - might make for a good YouMoz post
-
The pages in question dropped anywhere from 17 positions, to 45 on a couple. The timing of this is (almost) amusing, because I had a meeting scheduled with the company owner to discuss the fact that our site needs to change to allow for fresh content. It's a template site that around 200 other companies use in our industry, and I have been limited from day one as to what I can do SEO wise. The other sites that rank have all updated a while back. I have five other sites that we built from the ground up. They allow me to add "News" and "event updates" and they are slowly working their way up the pages. I reached out to another company that has the same template site as ours. We'll see if they have the same issues. I may just update the static content on one or two of the pages, and track it in the coming weeks. Lastly, I can certainly see that there are now pages from news sites that are pushing their way into search landscape. I'm leaning towards a non-freshness penalty.
-
How far have they dropped in ranking and has traffic also dropped off completely? I'd wonder what your competitors (e.g. the sites now above you) are doing - may be worth checking out their pages etc. Just curious as I know this question will come up for every SEO someday!
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
-
Number or percentage of new visitors impact Google rankings?
Hi all, Does the number/percentage of new visitors (from different IPs and countries) impact the Google rankings? If there are more number of new visitors, will Google favours the website in rankings considering the fact that new visitors are better than returning/same visitors? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Fred Google Update & Ecommerce Sites
Hi I've seen a couple areas of our site drop in average rankings for some areas since the 'Fred' update. We don't have ads on our site, but I'm wondering if it's 'thin' content - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ We are an ecommerce site and we have some content on our category pages - which is a bit more generic about the section/products within that section - but how can it not be if it's a category page with products on? I am working on adding topic based content/user guides etc to be more helpful for customers, but I'd love some advice on generating traffic to category pages. Is it better to rank these other topic/user guide pages instead of the category page & then hope the customer clicks through to products? Advice welcome 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Ranking For Synonyms Without Creating Duplicate Content.
We have 2 keywords that are synonyms we really need to rank for as they are pretty much interchangeable terms. We will refer to the terms as Synonym A and Synonym B. Our site ranks very well for Synonym A but not for Synonym B. Both of these terms carry the same meaning, but the search results are very different. We actively optimize for Synonym A because it has the higher search volume of the 2 terms. We had hoped that Synonym B would get similar rankings due to the fact that the terms are so similar, but that did not pan out for us. We have lots of content that uses Synonym A predominantly and some that uses Synonym B. We know that good content around Synonym B would help, but we fear that it may be seen as duplicate if we create a piece that’s “Top 10 Synonym B” because we already have that piece for Synonym A. We also don’t want to make too many changes to our existing content in fear we may lose our great ranking for Synonym A. Has anyone run into this issue before, or does anyone have any ideas of things we can do to increase our position for Synonym B?
Algorithm Updates | | Fuel0 -
Ranking Software
Hello Can anyone recommend the best rankings/tracking software - something that will track upto position 500 in the serps. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
What are tips for ranking on Google Maps?
I have another thread going where everyone is saying to keep both the Places profile as well as the Google Plus Local profile I have for my company. I have another person telling me that it has a negative effect to have both accounts at the same time so I'm assuming thats why the listing never comes up on places unless you zoom all the way into the map to the address of the storefront. With that being said, can anyone provide some good tips for ranking first page on google maps? Goole Plus Local - https://plus.google.com/114370561649922317296/about?gl=us&hl=en Google Places - https://plus.google.com/103220086647895058915/about?gl=us&hl=en
Algorithm Updates | | jonnyholt1 -
18 years later, Page Rank 6 Drops to 0, All +1s disappear, Scrapers outrank us
18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6 Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery. Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s. I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank? What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.
Algorithm Updates | | seoagnostic0 -
Google Algorithm Update .. Author-rank finally kicking in ?
These few days I've been seeing great movement of my sites growing by 70-100% in traffic spikes. Some how I think this has something to do with AuthorRank maybe kicking in now as more of a factor in rankings? Anyone have an idea whats going on ?
Algorithm Updates | | NikolasNikolaou0 -
Index Page lost rankings? Please Help!
This morning I ranked highly (Page 1 UK Google) for over 50 keyword search terms for my website http://www.careworx.co.uk This afternoon my rankings have bottomed out and dropped pages? I have not been de-indexed it appears and many of my sub-pages are still highly ranked. Would anybody know what has happened? I know of Google Panda but I would've seen results drop before now so I'm very concerned. Don't seem to have lost any links etc and am careful to balance SEO with a mix of techniques to keep Google happy and again, have not been de-indexed. Can anybody offer advice please, or let me know how I can rectify this.
Algorithm Updates | | andystep0