Making Changes to the Homepage, and Rankings Drop

Am I being penalised for making changes to my homepage?

[Onders]

I've been playing around with optimising a site over the last few months, and have recently noticed a trend that every time I make a change to my Homepage my rankings seem to drop in G. When I left it for a month or so the rankings climbed steadily. I thought that G liked the fact that sites did not remain stagnant, and were updated regularly. Could constant changes be having an adverse effect or am I fishing in the dark?!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

It would depend on the changes you are making. If these affect the basic SEO rules that got you there in the first place then your site will move.

[Onders]

Sure - but all I did was add a few words of text, and added a link to the tsunami appeal. Any ideas why?

[ouch]

There is somethin about not adversitin or adding commercial links in the help documentation.
May be cos' of that...or...oh well how would i know, i'm just newbie here. :-)

[PatrickDeese]

Google adjusts ranking on a nearly daily basis - though I doubt that your minor changes are having effects on your rankings, other variables - loss of links, changes in internal / external anchor text, or increased competition are more likely explanations.

There is somethin about not adversitin or adding commercial links in the help documentation.

That's nonsense. Show me where.

[edited by: PatrickDeese at 9:40 pm (utc) on Jan. 10, 2005]

[walkman]

"Sure - but all I did was add a few words of text, and added a link to the tsunami appeal. Any ideas why? "
this is NOT it then. Something else is causing yoru ranking problems

[ljgsites]

My theory is that Google needs time to re-evaluate your site when changes to content and especially outward links. Did you check the similar Pages? Does it show any related sites? If not, you may have to wait to be re-evaluated.

[LostOne]

"Did you check the similar Pages? Does it show any related sites?"

That thing seems to be broken too--anybody else feel the same?

[Spine]

Heres an odd thing.

I have a fairly bare 'splash style' index page with about 10 links to my most important internal pages and a graphic.

On my 'main' internal page I have links to another 80 of my pages, just like on my site map, and those pages are interlinked where relevant.

A week ago I added those other 80 internal links to my index page, freshbot came around, and a day later the www was missing from my index page listing, and it only showed up for 1 primary key phrase based on my domain name. The fresh tag was gone too, and the cache date was over a week old.

Doing a site: command showed my index page listed WITH the fresh tag, www, and recent cache (with all the new links).

I removed those links, and 2 days later, everything was back to normal. A few days later, I added the links again, and the exact same thing happened. I took them down, and back to normal a couple of days later.

I think I'll leave the index page as it is for now!

[irishaff]

Hi,

Consider how your changes may be doing the following:

Changing Keyword density

Changing Keyphrase proximity ( how close in the text are your keywords ).

Changing how far from the top your keyphrases are.

Changing the topic of the page ( context: links out and how many other links you have to help google disseminate the topic of the page ).

I generally find that on page stuff changing can move me up or down by ten spots.. but this is all dependant on the sector and competition etc. I know.

David

[wspwsp]

Hi,

may be just coincidence with the G update