Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a pr3 website that is fairly new (~9.5 months old). I have been targeting a three word search term for the last four months of that. The site had risen from obscurity to around 13 and once up to the first page. Unfortunately I think I may have made a n00b mistake and changed too many things on the index page too quickly and now I have no idea what the problem is.
I have made three changes sequentially to the site just before and since the rank change. The main page used to have A LOT of links to people who are in our local industry. It helped us get business from people looking more established companies who had synergy with what we are doing. I decided that it would be best for our interior pages to nofollow those links. That was the first change I made. The next change I made was to 301 redirect non-WWW to www. domain.
Shortly after this (on Christmas, merry Christmas) the page dropped from ranking 13 down to 80 and google indexed a different page than our main index page.
Since then I have moved the links off the main index page and focused the index page on just our content, keywords and internal links. I've checked all the outgoing links on our site for bad neighborhoods and they all look clean.
We were last indexed on the day I made the changes to the main page, so I am unsure of whether google indexed the new changes or not.
Our main index page does come up (very low) for some search results but for our targeted phrase, our blog is coming up between 35 and 41.
Any help or ideas would be incredibly appreciated!
Of the changes you mentioned, the canonical 301 redirect does have some potential for creating temporary troubles. It depends on how Google indexed your site previously, as well as which urls other sites used to link to you.
Long term, that was good move. For now, I'd suggest you make no more changes to the Home Page - just let things stabilize at Google and give the situation some time to settle out. Google scrutinizes 301 redirects rather closely before the full value starts to show up.
If you don't already have a Webmaster Tools account, I'd also suggest setting one up. The feedback can be helpful (as long as you don't freak out over information that doesn't make sense - it can be buggy). WMT also gives you a verified way to communicate with Google if tough situations come up.
I think there was about a 50/50 split of links to www/non-www before the redirect. At least the latest update of PR took it up to a 3. I know google keeps a more fluctuation version than what is on the toolbar, but it sure is nice to see a visible reward for link building. It seems like none of the ranking sites in our market have reached PR4, so I guess we're doing well there. I would still like to work harder on that.
I'll sit on the homepage for a while and work on some of the other pages for a bit. They are very light on any text, so I'd imagine that will help quite a bit.
Thanks for input!
