Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Ranking Dropped Significantly, Help?!

Posted by Anonymous on 6/24/2010 at 12:09 PM ET 50 Points
We've been doing SEO for our website that includes renaming images and rearranging directories, renaming files to include our keywords, etc.

We improved our ranking by a couple pages for that keyword, although I saw it took a dip back to around where it was for a few days then it was back up and has been consistently around the new position for almost 1 month...

we pushed some more SEO pages last Friday...it invovled moving some pages together into one (existing) directory and renaming them to include our keyword (not in a keyword stuffing way, in my opinion)..and it seems like google has crawled them...

Monday I saw the ranking drop again back to what it was originally and has not come back up yet. I'm not sure how long it took to get it come back up last time but I pulled the data on a Monday and then on a Thursday...

We've done directory changes before and I didn't see this happen...any ideas?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by matthewmnex on 6/24/2010 at 9:37 PM Accepted
    If you are focusing on organic traffic then page rank is not such a big isue.

    The realquestion is what is happening to your traffic? are you getting more? how long are people staying on the page? are they reading the materials you are writing for your SEO?

    etc. Define your goals and monitor what is happening in the real world.

    Goal I want ally a goal traffic
    Goal I want better qualified traffic
    Goal I want more leads (email address collection)

    Higher page rank in itself is not reallly a goal but a means to achieving your higher goals so check first your results before worrying too much about page ranks.

    Now - if you are doing 'Paid Search' with ad words then page rank rally comes into play.

    Why ? because Google decides the placement of your ad based on a simple formuka. BID X page rank.

    Therefore if your bid is 0.1 but you have a page rank of 10 then yopu have a bid of 1 so you will get great exposure.

    If you bid 0.5 but your page rank is 2 then you willend up with the same result but it will cost you much more to get it.

    Therefore, I agree, focus on Page rank enormously if yopu are buying traffic.

    If you are only concerned about free search then don't worry too much about page rank.

    Good luck.

    Matthew
  • Posted by excellira on 7/1/2010 at 1:52 AM Accepted
    Did you implement permanent redirects when you renamed your resources, directories, URI, etc?

    If not you've pulled the plug on one page and are waiting for the new page to move up. You probably got a bump because it was fresh content and once the SE normalized their results you got pushed back.

    Keep in mind that you've done almost everything you can do to destabilize your results. Keep a close eye out on the page that is performing poorly and if it doesn't improve you may want to roll back the page. It is possible to receive an over-optimization penalty.

    On future pages, consider taking a less aggressive approach and roll changes in over time so that you can better monitor the effects of the changes.

  • Posted by excellira on 7/1/2010 at 11:59 AM Member
    Google tends to show the home page more in results but that isn't indicative of it being optimized for more than one term.

    Are you optimizing more than one page for a given term? If so, duplicate title tags could cause trouble.

    In .htaccess:
    Redirect 301 /directory/original-page.html https://example.com/new-directory/new-page.html

    You can also use wildcards but the above will suit when dealing with a few pages.
  • Posted by excellira on 7/2/2010 at 12:45 PM Member
    I should have, more correctly, said the text in the <title> element.

    Your implementation is correct.
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