1. You lose the fresh content bonus. When you first put a piece of content online, it will often rank extremely well right out of the gate. This happens because Google has a filter in their system that gives a bonus to brand new content. You’ll notice that after a week or two, your ranking can start to slide. This happens because the fresh content bonus goes away. A lot of people panic when they find themselves in this situation. The solution is to promote the content well so that plenty of other sites link to it. Even though you lose the fresh content bonus, you can still rank well (even #1) if your piece of content has the most link strength of all the documents that are related to the keyword in question.
2. Your internal link structure changes. This reason affects most bloggers, sometimes without their knowledge. Think about it, when you first click publish, your blog creates a new page for your post and also usually lists your post on your home page. Some blogs also link to their newest posts, with a ‘Recent Posts’ section of the sidebar. This means that the home page of the site is linking to the new post, and also means that each page of the site is linking to the new post (if you’re using a ‘Recent Posts’ section).
If you publish a bunch of new posts, that will all change. The original post will fall off of the home page, and will drop out of the ‘Recent Posts’ section. When that happens, most of its link juice goes away and it won’t rank as well as it originally did. The solution is to do a better job linking to the post from within your site. ProBlogger has a great post about this concept: Interlink Your Old Blog Posts. If you’re not a blogger the same concepts still apply. You need to pass more links from within your site to your new piece of content.
3. The link structure on sites that are linking to you changes. Let’s say that some solid blogs like this post and decide to link to it – so they create some posts on their sites and link here. If that happens, their posts will be on their home pages, at least until they’re pushed off. While their posts are on their home pages, I will be getting more link juice than I will a month from now. Here in a month they will have tons of new posts and the posts that linked to me won’t be as strong as they originally were.
This happens on a lot of different types of sites. Ezine Articles is a site where you can submit a piece of content, in exchange for a link. When your article is first published on Ezine, it will be displayed prominently on the site, in fact it’s often linked to from the Ezine home page. As time goes on the article will fall deeper and deeper into the site until it settles in as just any other page on the site. At that point it will be much weaker than it was when it started out and therefore won’t pass as much link weight as it originally did.
The solution to this issue is to do a better job of promoting your piece of content. You’ll need more links to replace what was lost. Multiple links from blogs, Ezine Articles, and other sites can make up for the strength that’s gone.
4. Duplicate content. I’ve had a few times where I’ve seen entire sites copied and put up on another domain by a black hatter. In other cases I’ve seen single articles being stolen. This isn’t usually a problem until the black hatter starts throwing tens of thousands of links at his version of the original site or article. In some situations, Google doesn’t handle this well. Usually the stronger site wins. If a black hatter is able to make a stronger version of your site or article because of black hat links, you may see a huge drop in your rankings. This is because Google now believes that your site is the spam site.
If you find yourself in this situation, there are a lot of things that you can do. First of all, you can contact the site who stole your content to let them know that you’re aware of their theft. You can also report them as spam to Google – you can do this inside your Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure to tell them everything you know about what happened. Give them dates, if possible. That alone will usually take care of the problem because Google can easily figure out who put up the content first with a manual review. If it comes to it you can file a cease and desist order, and in some cases a civil law suit.
If you only have a single article that’s stolen from you, it doesn’t usually affect your entire site. It will only affect that single article. You may have bigger problems if your entire site gets ripped off.
If a spammer steals your content and links back to you, you usually won’t have any problem at all. Google uses links to determine the original source of content. You’ll run into more of an issue if their version of your article doesn’t link back to you.
5. Your site becomes stale. Over time your competition may attract more and more links. They may publish more and more content. If you fall behind them in these two areas, you’ll start to lose momentum with Google. Google counts not only the overall link strength of your site, but also the momentum you have for attracting new links. If you don’t attract any new links, you’ll start to slip (assuming your competition is attracting new links).
The obvious solution here is to create new content and attract new links. Usually when this happens to me on a site it only takes a few new links and a few new articles on the site. This of course will depend on how competitive your keyword is.
Questions/Comments? If you have any additional reasons that you’ve seen rankings drop, please help everyone by leaving them in the comments. Also let me know if you have any questions, or if you can back up what was said in this post.
One of my sites experienced an 75% traffic drop in Google. I stupidly decided to fix it by changing the permalink structure. The old structure was /%year%/%postname%/ – I substituted category for year. I made things much much worse. Now it’s a good day if there are 10 pageviews!
Is there any way I can get my site back on tract? I plan to do some article marketing.
Compounding the link problem is the fact that I used a number of PLR posts the first couple of years, but for the last year I’ve used only original stuff.
Should I delete the old PLR posts and use just the original stuff?
Any advice much appreciated.
Hey Dana! It’s going to take a while to recover from changing your permalink structure. You need to get some new links for your site and get rid of the PLR stuff. After the PLR stuff is gone I would add some more original content!
Good article Court! Blogs are a nice, easy way to make a website, but the whole linking structure can throw a few curve balls! I changed some of my permalinks before and had a drop in ranking and pr.
Now, I just make sure I have my final permalink structure in its final mode before tying to get backlinks to my blogs.
Do you recommend removing all that “date” structure from your blog posts? These days, I try to make my blogs look as much like a static website as possible. With wordpress blogs, I change the permalink structure to be /%postnam%/ only.
Ben K.
Hey Ben! That actually depends on the type of site you’re working with. If you have a small niche site, I would probably get the dates out. If you’re running a blog, it doesn’t hurt to leave them in. I also use postname only if I’m running a niche site!
How does google decide which backlinks it is going to show when you type in “link:www.domain.com”. Basically, I have many backlinks recorded with google but in different niches. Google doesn’t recognize any of my backlinks, even those with strong PR, in the same niche. Why?
Tom,
Google only shows a sample of your links when you do the “link:www.domain.com” search. Yahoo shows more of your links than Google does but still is not completely reliable because it may not be up to date.
Read Court’s post from a few days ago: 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Look Up Your Links
Tom, Boyd got this one exactly right. Thanks Boyd!
Thanks you guys–there are a lot of myths out there about why Google does the things it does. In fact, making up this type of myth has become a cottage industry. Myself, I appreciate information based on testing, not speculation.
Tom: none of us knows what links Google really recognizes, and how it chooses which links to tell us it recognizes. We do know that the links you see it recognizing (by using the link: command or SEOquake) are only a small percentage of the links it actually sees. It keeps people (like us) from gaming their system.
Lorecee I couldn’t agree more. I despise all of the theory-throw-around. No one can have conviction of anything they haven’t tested!
Court and Mark,
Say you have 200 niche sites (like you guys probably do). How in the world are you going to keep adding new content/links in this situation?
You do it as needed. I have sites that haven’t needed to be updated for well over a year – almost two years actually. They aren’t all going to need it at once, this only happens every once in a while.
Hey Court–just wondering what tools you usually use for checking duplicate content. Do you know of any software or script that would do this for you automatically and send out an alert as soon as it happens? It seems like if someone could be proactive it might help prevent a drop in rankings.
In my case Amanda I write way to much content to be able to check it all. Usually I’m aware of who is in front of me in the search results and I don’t worry about it unless a piece that I wrote ranks in front of me. Most of the time the thief will let the article link back to you, and if they do that it will show up as a pingback in WordPress.
Court/Mark,
Your Colorado Lasik Surgery Guide site doesn’t have any new contents for a while (except for the youtube videos) but it still ranks as #1 site for the keyword ‘colorado lasik’.
Why don’t you experience any drop in the ranking?
Just wondering, not that I want Google to rank you lower than #1
Thanks for all the tips
Hey affzan! A lot of keywords act that way. Once you get a top ranking, you can stay that way for a long, long time – sometimes for years. Eventually that ranking is going to slide and if it does, I’ll do some updates.
Hi Court,
I have a question about unique IP links, I know that it is important to have them, but how does that affect using services like Article Marketer, UAW and BLS? If you submit multiple articles to the same sites over and over, will only the first article link really count, will the subsequent links become irrelevant, or so much weaker that it would be best to just get the link once from them? Specifically I an curious about services like BLS?
Thanks
All of the links will actually count JR, but the first link you get from each IP will be the strongest. That doesn’t mean you have to stop after one link though.
I don’t know what you’re referring to with BLS!
Thanks for the quick reply Court, BLS is Backlink Solutions, the network for posting blog posts with links.
From what I understand, Backlink Solutions has a pretty large network of blogs, but I haven’t used their service! I also don’t know if each of their sites is on unique IPs or not. To find that out you would have to use it, wait for the links to come through, and then find the server IPs.
that’s true Google PR for a website can drop if you stopepd blogging ,so atleast one update can make Google don’t drop the pr .
great tips. ima go check out my blog now to see if anything needs fixing.
Thanks Court!
Court just a question. For small niche/mini sites, how many posts do you recommend having? For my major sites, I try to aim for 10-30, but for some of my set-up-and-leave sites have between 3-5 posts of unique content. All the posts are about 500-600 words; some may be even 700-1000 words. My goal is to get as many niche sites out there as possible, then start to work the backlinks while letting a lot of them age. However, it’s a problem if I have to populate each niche site with like 10 pages of content rather than 2-5 posts!
Ben K
From what I’ve read, about four 300-400 word posts and one 500-700 word post is quite enough (the one that is left alone on the homepage that is targeting your keyword).
Great article, you have certainly opened my eyes.
#1 Reason: You lose the fresh content bonus.
I was wondering why a couple of my sites got a PR 2 after only a month online, “The Google Bonus” first time for everything, lol
Reason #2: Your internal link structure changes.
Your advice is sound; I use SEO Smart links plugin that does a fair job, although I have to constantly keep an eye out for keyword linking that it may have missed. “”SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog””
Reason #3: The link structure on sites that are linking to you changes.
Excellent description of link structure, I suppose its self explanatory really! Keep the fresh content coming. I can see your point in the Ezine Articles example. I have submitted articles to Ezine Article but haven’t kept up the submissions, so I guess I have to promote more.
Reason#4: Duplicate content.
This is a tough one; I don’t think you can do a lot about it, I state quite clearly on my about page that anyone is welcome to use my articles as long as they leave the links and author name intact. Of course any determined blackhatter will always win out. It’s harder to prove it’s your content if the links have been stripped out.
Reason #5: Your site becomes stale.
This just goes to show what blogging and writing is all about, plain old hard work and effective CMS Strategy. In a nutshell!
Thanks for the Tips
Really good information about SEO. Many people seems like asking this questions very often, I think they got all answers here.
Hi Court…I really appreciate the great info here. I have a question, I want to delete about 30 different post on my wordpress blog. Will deleting these pages hurt my SEO rankings? The pages that I want to delete are all indexed but they are duplicate content post. I don’t want to take a chance a leave that content on my blog but I am not sure if I should just delete them…and if so should I delete them all at once?
You guys mentioned deleting PLR content which is another form of duplicate content but you guys did not touch on how deleting those duplicate posts/content will affect you site, especially if the pages are indexed.
How does Google handle deleted posts once they have been indexed?
Please let me know.
Thanks.
For point 1 it might not be that applicable in my personal opinion. I mean lets say we have a small company who might just update their news page once every fortnight or 2, wont this be very disadvantaged to them?
I have noticed that if I don’t keep fresh back links coming in weekly I will lose placement. My site is a static site, not a blog so how do I keep adding fresh material on the pages without having them a mile long ? I do have a blog attached to my site but in the structure it would be the last page. I do post on it but not enough.