Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Now I had the time to fill in the content - and the side dropped to a rank between 150 and 200. I'm curious and almost about to delete all the content going back to my one main-page which ranked so well.
But the new content can't (shouldn't...) be the reason, or what do you think?
1) the content was unrelated to the phrase you were ranking well for
2) The content is duplicate content.
Apart from that is your page correctly marked up?
My site is ecommerce and since we wanted to make each page unique we have hired a copywriter to write unique description for products and paragraphs for the category pages.
It seemed like a good action at the time but the results were not so good, we lost most of our long tail traffic and some of our main keywords.
My thinking is that Google when indexing a site first categorize it as informative site, ecommerce etc. and then have a different set of rules for each. In my case with the ecommerce site I guess Google knows by now that there is a limited amount of text & information you can have of a page for blue widget. So if you try to be smart and add even unique content that is slightly off topic (like history of the product or anything that is not directly connected to the product) your page theme as ecommerce get diluted and you end up in the gray zone between ecommerce and informative site.
When thinking of it I realized that I added the content not for my customers but for the search engines. A customer who is searching for a specific product wants to find a page that have the product, a short explanation and a price tag. Most of them are not interested in a wiki style information describing the products and everything related to it.
I still think that adding detailed related content is important but only where it belongs ( information pages, etc) adding the text to your products page will cause the page to loose focus and to dive in serps.
I see many of my competitors adding products pages with just different titles, a picture of the products and a price tag and they are doing great, my pages all with long description and informational data are not showing in serps.
So maybe the key-point is that when you try to sell products just do it with out adding content to the page that is not directly related.
Maybe Google finally realized that an ecommerce website can add a very limited amount of data and if you show more information that the threshold, Google looks at it like trying to manipulate serps. Or that by adding to much info that is not backed up by inbounds links with anchor text that is not related to the general information you just change the theme and loose points.
you can go into the details of your example if you want say this or that must have been the problem..if you take an overall look at pages that get dropped after 'some' change..the one common factor is the 'change'.....personally it has the feel of an anti seo measure to combat adjustments to a page to measure what each change does within the algo....perhaps its time based and only after a period of stability will those pages come back...perhaps it only kicks in if your site scores (or doesnt score) for other factors...i know people always come back and say well what about news sites..they change all the time...thats not true..only really the home page changes all the time and i dont think the homepage suffers the same affect....the news pages themselves dont change after creation...
