QOTD - I Lose Rank When I Update
Last Update: July 20, 2012
Hi there,

One of my Squidoo lenses (which I have not updated in several months) was ranked #3 spot on Googles first page for the keyword phrase "herbs for infertility"....until yesterday.

It's been getting some nice traffic and I've made some sales so I figured to keep the momentum going, I will update it. Big mistake? Now I've been dropped to the bottom of page 1!

My question is why would I lose rank when I've updated a site? Has anyone else experienced this?

http://www.squidoo.com/herbs-4-infertility

Any input would be appreciated.

Dee

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Shawn Martin Premium
Interesting comments, thanks everyone for the input here.
Ruggero Premium
onefineham has a valid arguement. In my experience whenever I change things on a page I expect it to do some "dancing" in the rankings for a little while. I let it run for about a week and then build some good quality links back to that page and find myself usually in a better position than before!

I've even had sites completely disappear from the Google index, but usually only for a day or 2.
Deezdz Premium
Interesting. I'm curious to see if this site will pop back up in the top 3 again.

Maybe if I have a site sitting at the top, I should leave well enough alone?

For larger sites or authority sites, it makes sense to keep adding fresh content, but for a one page lens, maybe I just should have let it be. Today my traffic has dropped to almost nil.

Thanks for the feedback
onefineham Premium
I heard a story the other day about a guy that "SEO-ed / beautified" one of his ugly pages and got dumped in rankings. He undid the changes and was back where he was.

I think over SEO-ed sites are being culled out as "unnatural" for lack of a better term, but that is just speculation based on a 3rd party source.
onefineham Premium
I would expect updating the site caused a ping to go out to google to revisit your site - which resulted in a google crawl of your site. I find it unlikely the content of your changes caused your site to fall. More likely one of the recent updates to the algo got applied to your squidoo page when the page was recrawled. I've seen this happen in a number of cases.
Deezdz Premium
Are the pages not crawled on a regular basis, or only when a change is made?
Ruggero Premium
Pages are "crawled" or indexed anytime the Google bot finds its way to your page through links or notifications (such as pings etc). Indexing is a natural, ongoing thing, and yes, if Google hadn't revisited your site since the last update (think it was July 17), then it's possible that it affected your rankings.

To answer your other question, if I'm on position 1, I usually leave well enough alone when it comes to my content and only work on maintaining my position with backlinks, although I do make (smaller) changes to improve my conversion rate.
Deezdz Premium
Great information Ruggero...learned something new. Ya, I really wish I had left well enough alone but I'll chalk it up to a learning experience. Have a great day!
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