Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Around 3 months ago we had around 150 pages that were all ranking top 7 in Google drop out of the top 50. One day they were all ranking the next day they were gone! We assumed this was some kind of penalty.
Admittedly many of these pages were boilerplate pages, /widgets/blue-widgets.html, /widgets/green-widgets.html with the same copy just the widget color changed. However many weren’t and contained unique content and these were also affected. In fact it was every page in the /widgets/ directory that was affected.
Our first course of action was to re-write the content of the most popular pages to ensure they were all unique. We kept the pages on the original URLs because these pages all had good incoming links. After 2 months this still had no effect.
Our next step was to move the re-written content to a completely new directory and therefore a new URL, and 301 the old pages to the new ones.
The very next day we saw a handful of the new pages ranking for the keywords that were previously lost. Since then we have seen improvements and more of the re-written pages ranking well.
Now we have a situation where most of the pages are ranking top 10 for their main keywords, not as high as they were before but it is certainly better than nothing!
The question we now have is should we try to get the incoming links to the old pages changed to the new pages, or would changing a bunch of links within a small space of time look like a manipulative practice?
From what I've seen, it does seem to help. Google may see this as a kind of trust signal, since the owner can do all kinds of things with redirects on their own site, but now others are vouching for the change in urls.
