Big Serps Drop

[doovde]

Ok guys I went through some of my pages and tried to improve the on page SEO. I started with my bonus pages and had a bit of a disaster with one of them.

My foxy bingo page used to rank on page 2 in google for foxy bingo and has now dropped to page 7. Not really sure why becasue the same changes which I made on the other pages have not seemed to have any real effect.

If anyone has any ideas then let me know.

Dave

[Mr-AJ]

I'd wait for a few days or even weeks. One of my sites also dropped from 1 to nowhere although I didn't changed that much. Only put some new content online. A few days later it was back on track.

But it's also possible that you made changes that Google doesn't like. I had sites losing rankings because of too keyword crowded content.
So it's helpful to know what you've done in detail.

[doovde]

Well my target phrase is foxy bingo. I have added the player testimonials and bulked out the first bit of text with some bolded content.

I have done the same on pages that haven't dropped at all.

[Mr-AJ]

I can't believe that this is the reason. If you don't exaggerate it you shouldn't have any problems. I can only speak for keyword crowded content not for bold, italic etc. content. Never tried that in a big way.

[Unknown Webmaster]

I have had sites pretty much disappear while I hadn't done anything out of the ordinary just to resurface a couple of days later.

I'v also had sites where I messed up and they haven't come back (I didn't do that much work on them after they dropped).

I took a look at the cache for your front page, and it looks like you went from mentioning "foxy bingo" 4 times (2%) to 28 times (10%) and having it in bold 12 times. I haven't done enough testing to know if that could be a problem, however, the change was bigger than what I expected from your post.

You may be able to gather a bit of information from this thread:
Site dropped into oblivion - what to do about it?

[CorryC]

As Unknown Webmaster stated - that is a pretty big change.

Either way. Sometimes, these things just happen. They often have nothing to do with your changes or with anything at all. Google changes their algorithm on a regular basis. Not only that, but other sites get indexed, things change and rankings change. It takes a lot of time for things to develop as well. You could completely lose your rankings and then within a couple weeks all of a sudden (with no change at all) you could be on the first page and rankings could be higher than ever.

If you are really worried, just change things back the way they where the first time and then keep testing from there.

[Michael Martinez]

Was the old version of the page using pound sterling symbols before you updated the copy?

Keeping in mind that I cannot explain what happened to you (I have no idea of what the page looked like before), I see two on-page factors that may trigger special filtering.

First, you have a prominent date from January. Second, you use the sterling pound symbol.

You might have tripped on the "Query Deserves Freshness" threshold -- a factor you can do little about. Or you may simply have enjoyed a temporary Universal Search injection from Blogsearch and now your 15 minutes of fame is over. It's hard to say but if that date never changes then without any links pointing to the page you should expect it to fade given how competitive the query is.

It's also possible that Google has decided your page doesn't belong in American search results. How does it do in Google UK? I see it on the first page for "foxy bingo bonus". That seems pretty good to me.

Are you trying to rank for American search results? If so, using British symbols on a UK domain name would not be my first choice for optimization.

Google is not one search engine, it is MANY search engines (so are Ask, Microsoft, and Yahoo!). When you're dealing with multiple regions and languages, you have to think in terms of how many search engines can/should one page rank for. You don't always get to pick and choose where your content will rank.

Sometimes the search engines just tweak something in the background and it only has a profound impact on one person. You might be that one lucky guy this week.

[doovde]

Thanks for the response guys the page actually came back a little and is now on page 3.

I will try to get rid of the date and point a few new links at it.

I did change quite a lot on the page. I'm sure the KW density will have risen and the title used to be just Foxy Bingo Bonus where as now it is Foxy Bingo Bonus - Foxy Bingo Deposit and sign up bonus.

So I'm thinking it's probably one of those factors.

[scrawnybob]

hi

I'd say the new 10% on keyword is high - others say none of that matters but Ive had drops and recoveries from over doing keywords - 10% definately overdoing it IMHO - maybe 7-8% is ok but as a max to be safe and I've had pages rank really well with only keyword rate of 3% so I think its maybe more a case of dont upset by going over board than try to hit close to the upper figure to get higher (but that may over simplification)

I'd guess you've over cooked with the higher % + bolding ... just reduce the keywords down somewhere between the 2% and the 10% and less bolding and I'd bet it will come back within 3 weeks

out of interest can someone clarify the issue with using the £ sign ?

Ive recently added one sitewide for a site that is £ bonus - how would this affect google ? do they really geo target on that ?

cheers scrawnybob

[Michael Martinez]

I did change quite a lot on the page. I'm sure the KW density will have risen and the title used to be just Foxy Bingo Bonus where as now it is Foxy Bingo Bonus - Foxy Bingo Deposit and sign up bonus.

So I'm thinking it's probably one of those factors.

Here is a little theory for you (as in "it's an SEO theory" not as in "it's a hypothesis explaining your situation").

Google has patented a technique for hashing a page's content. There is no real indication that they use it so I wouldn't go to the bank on this. Still, the patent seems to explain certain behaviors in Google's search results.

Although I don't know exactly how the hashing algorithm works, you can think of taking a page with a lot of text and boiling it down to a long string of numbers and characters. That string would have special significance, sort of like a cypher or code. Instead of having to index every word on the page, Google would just index the hash.

Google has also stated (primarily through spam fighter Matt Cutts) that INTERNAL PageRank (not the Toolbar PR) is used to determine which of your pages are placed into the Supplemental Index and the Main Web Index. The more internal PageRank you have, the more likely you'll end up in the MWI.

I'm convinced that pages in the Main Web Index are fully analyzed and indexed, a process that seems to require a fair amount of time. A page can appear in the Main Web Index in a partially indexed state and a few days later (sometimes a few weeks later) it will be fully indexed. One indication that a page is fully indexed is that it ranks for many obscure, unique expressions.

Pages in the Supplemental Index, however, do not rank for obscure, unique expressions. You'll see these pages show for only a very small number of the queries to which they are relevant.

Now, maybe Google is using its hashing algorithm for all Web pages. Maybe it only uses that algorithm for Supplemental pages. It's hard to say.

But generally speaking I like to wait a few days after I see a page appear in Google's search results before I arbitrarily decide it is either Supplemental or MWI. I can only make a guess based on how the page behaves in search results. There is no way to be absolutely sure (for anyone who works outside Google).

So you say you substantially changed the content of the page. I suggest that you just need to give the search engine time to reindex or rehash or whatever the page content. It's normal to lose search visibility after you make substantial changes to page content.