Literally followed all the basic whitehat advice and spent last weekend updating 5 of my old top performing articles that were slipping dwon page1. i added fresh info better imags anf tweaked headers. checked search console today and they dropped eevn further to page 2 like whyy does google penalize u for making content better now?? should i revert back to the old text or leave it.
1) You very rarely want to mess around with page 1 rankings unless you really know what you're doing.
2) The big mistake everyone makes is they define: "good content" and then apply that judgement to change content, and assume what they think is good content, is what will rank.
This is faulty. Good content is not good content.
Good content is content that resolves the situations of the searchers.
This is exactly what core updates do. They re-rank based on Google having updated the centroid for what the ideal page looks like for different search queries.
You just moved your page away from the centroid, so you dropped.
Note: There's also a 3rd thing to consider: Sometimes, you will drop before you go back up depending on your site. Whatever you do, don't change a THING on the page.
If you change, drop, and change again, you're locked. This is a part of the algo to detect 'testing' or trying to game the algo.
