Hi All,
My company re-launched a website on the 17th December 2009. The 10+ year old domain was retained as were the vast majority of pages/urls. We were very careful to all ensure all content was optimised in line w/ best practice (301 redirects/404 error pages) and further to the site launch - organic visibility for all key terms was retained in the top 10 listings.
On the 7th of January - a listing for 1 key page dropped from position #6 to position #35 on Google.
NB: During this time there was no change in competitor listings or banklinks as key competitors had at most 7 external backlinks.
11th January - Title tags and metadata for this page were updated and the page was resubmitted to Google.
21st January - We saw no change in visibility for this page. (All other pages retained competitive listings). We tested separating the content on this exact page into shorter paragraphs.
3rd February - Further to no change in visibility we edited copy to include keyword rich text and more content. A long list of contacts at the bottom of the page was removed.
4th February - The page listing jumped from position #35 to #24. Additionally, the Google page rank improved from 3 to 5.
Since then, the page has remained at position #24.
I have been working on linkbuilding but there has been no improvement. Although my page has yet to gain any quality inbound links, competitor pages returned for the same search have fewer than 3 inbound links (and none of these pages appear to have more quality content). I can't understand why this page would have dropped from position #6 to #24.
I don't want to make any more changes to this page as I'm afraid it is being held in a sandbox and don't want to make the page look spammy. I'm aware of the impact of Caffeine and have tried to optimise all content accordingly.
If anyone could offer any advice as to what my next steps should be I would appreciate it.
Thanks!
