Newly added article displaced home page, but much lower in SERPS

[Slade]

Greetings,

I set up some initial backlinks to a new site, all pointing to home page. The home page is beginning to rank for a few terms(positions 20-160, on seven monitored keywords).

Two weeks ago, I uploaded an article targeting one of those keywords directly. A few days later, I added a link from content on the home page to the article. (This is not a blog.)

The home page was sitting in the 70s for this keyword until today. Now the article is sitting at 133 and the homepage at 386.

Is this normal(or expected)?

If I can get some backlinks in place for the new article, should I expect to recover that position?

[deadsea]

I think there may be some sort of "phrase targeting penalty" built into panda. It doesn't make sense to me, but it appears that Google may be viewing websites that look at their traffic and try to better target for what they are ranking as spammy.

[spyjunior]

This is normal and expected. This means that you are getting better competitors in the same keywords. As long as you are doing quality backlinks and add quality contents you will get back your expected ranking sooner.

[Planet13]

Hi there, Slade:

Are you absolutely sure that you didn't make any technical errors when you added the article page?

Did you by chance change the meta title tag of the home page when you added the article?

I did something like this, and I think that my site MIGHT have done that too. However, at some point after creating that article, I accidentally noindexed the home page for a month (Doh!) so it is hard to say with any certainty what was affecting what.

If you have another page on your site that has significant inbound links, I would like to it from that page and see if rankings don't change within one to two weeks.

[Slade]

@deadsea - That's interesting. It would be a good way to shut down MFA sites. I set up the site with just the home page, intending to branch out and cover the main keywords as I could create content. If that were the case, you couldn't put up a new site until all content had been built. That seems silly.

@spyjunior - I read your response as "someone else out-SEO'ed you, try harder." Was that accurate, or did I misunderstand? Remember, this is a new page targeting that keyword.

@Planet13 - I don't remember making any other changes, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.


This is the first time I've actually built a site that I've wanted to promote, so I'm not used to the fluctuations of ramping up.

[nippi]

You want to recover a site to being on page 8?

[Planet13]

You want to recover a site to being on page 8?

I seriously doubt that is the end outcome he is shooting for.