Site Ranking Dropped After I changed the Home Page

[gillianlisa]

Hi all. Was hoping if some guru can enlighten me.

Several days ago, I changed the front page of my website with another page. Both pages are optimized in terms of SEO for my particular keyword. I changed it because I felt the original article was looking a tad too long and was doing a bit of test to see if my other article would convert better. (on hind sight seems a bit silly)

The next day, my ranking for my main keyword dropped from 4 into oblivion. And the strange thing is that some of my secondary key words which were ranked in the top 10 also disappeared.

I kind of panicked and reverted back to my original article as the home page. It's been about three days and still no sign of my ranking coming back although it still ranks in top ten for yahoo and bing.

Anybody that might have an idea how i can rectify this?

cheers,
gil

 

[darkmonk]

The thing to remember is that Google is not instant. Its more like guiding a big ship or flying a large jet propelled airliner carrying many passengers with a high loaded weight at takeoff with full fuel tanks.

In other words, I would have waited more than 1 day after changing the home page. Maybe give it a week.

 

[Joeblack99]

All you did was change the text right? You didn't mess with .htaccess, robots, metas etc. ?

 

[the_demon]

It's more likely to do with backlinks than actual site content especially for such drastic ranking changes.

 

[Aullus]

The same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. What I did was go from a wordpress stickied post on my homepage, to a "page" with new text (same content, just completely re-written) to be more search engine friendly.

I dropped from the first page down to I don't even know where for most of my keywords. I'm hoping it just threw me into a crazy dance that I'll eventually end up better off from.

Nevertheless, I regret doing it. Lesson learned.

 

[gillianlisa]

All you did was change the text right? You didn't mess with .htaccess, robots, metas etc. ?

Nope. All I did was point the home page to another page on the site which was also optimized for the same keyword.

 

[gillianlisa]

The same thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. What I did was go from a wordpress stickied post on my homepage, to a "page" with new text (same content, just completely re-written) to be more search engine friendly.

I dropped from the first page down to I don't even know where for most of my keywords. I'm hoping it just threw me into a crazy dance that I'll eventually end up better off from.

Nevertheless, I regret doing it. Lesson learned.

So u mean after a few weeks nothing changed? Gosh. That's harsh. Anyone knows any way to rectify this? Could google have mistakenly thought the content was duplicate? I don't blast out much backlinks. Only use amr. But I have other sites which have improved in SERPS after the same amr blasts. So don't think that's the reason. Quite sure it's something to do with changing of the home page.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Aullus]

Actually, I have seen minor improvements. For example, when I made that change I even dropped for my exact url keywords ie "dog training" if my domain was www(dot)dogtraining(dot)com. I actually dropped to page 6 right away, a couple days ago I hit position 10. This is after being at postion 2 for around 2 years. I'm betting that I'll bounce back even more within the coming weeks.

 

[tjs54]

I'll tell you what, I have decided that if my sites are on page one I don't touch them. I had the number one spot for a partcular search term for months on Google, I added another page (WordPress) with some more related content and it dropped to number three, traffic has dropped off a lot now, I was getting a little more than 5000 unique per month and now it's down to about 2000. At least I'm still on page one but I hope it moves back up to #1. As someone said, "lesson learned".

 

[plumbum416]

I think after a big change on indexed pages happens, google has to reconfigure the rankings, and as SERP's aren't anything instand this might take a while, but the better advice here is:

Never change a running system

 

[Aim100IM]

stop thinking those things and make more links for your site.probably you changed meta data and that caused some effects..not sure though....
keep making more links.i have faced similar problem once , when i changed my wp theme but things were settled after some time.

 

[tacitinc]

I dunno how many times i gotta post this until people get the picture.. lol it was prolly panda ... same shit happened to me on the last panda crawl.

 

[DangerousDEN]

Hi all. Was hoping if some guru can enlighten me.

Several days ago, I changed the front page of my website with another page. Both pages are optimized in terms of SEO for my particular keyword. I changed it because I felt the original article was looking a tad too long and was doing a bit of test to see if my other article would convert better. (on hind sight seems a bit silly)

The next day, my ranking for my main keyword dropped from 4 into oblivion. And the strange thing is that some of my secondary key words which were ranked in the top 10 also disappeared.

I kind of panicked and reverted back to my original article as the home page. It's been about three days and still no sign of my ranking coming back although it still ranks in top ten for yahoo and bing.

Anybody that might have an idea how i can rectify this?

cheers,
gil

man don't worry. Same thing happened to me.
i had crappy article and was ranking #89(just started for medium comp KW)
than i put quality article. Website disappear from the ranking for 4 days and than come back to #20 spot! Wish you the same.

 

[gillianlisa]

I think after a big change on indexed pages happens, google has to reconfigure the rankings, and as SERP's aren't anything instand this might take a while, but the better advice here is:

point taken ... lol .... and definitely lesson learnt ....

 

[gillianlisa]

man don't worry. Same thing happened to me.
i had crappy article and was ranking #89(just started for medium comp KW)
than i put quality article. Website disappear from the ranking for 4 days and than come back to #20 spot! Wish you the same.

thanks mate ... if i bounce back stronger i will buy u lunch ,,, lol .... will update u guys if i really do bounce back ....

cheers,
gil

 

[Joeblack99]

One thing, I know you didn't mess with .htaccess but I've seen homepages eradicated from the serps after tinkering with redirects, with their other pages still ranking.

That generally indicates a penalty, but one client then went right back to number one for their emd term within a day! after removing the faulty redirect.

I think its something to do with either unintended cloaking, or unintended non-indexing, just sayin as you mentioned 'pointing' the home page to a different page?