Why did our ranking go up, then drop down again?

[PaulFraserCollectibles]

Hello SEOMoz community.

I work for a website that runs a collectibles news service and sells collectibles online.

I recently renamed one of the pages from "Stock for Sale" to "Collectibles for Sale" anticipating this would help our ranking for the term "collectibles for sale". This changes the Title, URL and h1 to Collectible for Sale.

A few days later we were up to 5th on Google UK for that keyword.

But now after the weekend we've dropped off the face of the earth... Or at least somewhere low down in the rankings.

I imagine there could be multiple reasons for this, but what are the most likely causes?

There is not much text on the page, it contains an iFrame with image boxes that link to relevant collectibles categories.

Website: www.paulfrasercollectibles.com

[evolvingSEO]

It appears as if you have two versions of the page indexed;

http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/Collectibles-for-Sale/1850.page

and

http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/Collectibles-for-Sale/

The rel="canonical" cites http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/Collectibles-for-Sale/1850.page as the page that should count in the index, however on your site its the other page which is linked to from the menu.

It would require a deeper look at things to tell what is going on for sure, but having duplicate versions of the same page in the index is certainly something of concern.

At quick glance I see a few other things that should be addressed when I view source; including a style tag and title tag not closing correctly.

-Dan

3B9LArt0Y

[PaulFraserCollectibles]

Hi Dan, thanks for the response.

I see what you mean about the two versions. It seems to be worse than that as well. The page was originally called "Stock for Sale" which is also indexed twice.

We were under the impression that using rel="canonical" would mean Google only indexed one url for the page. Even if older URL's are still used on the website. Should this other urls drop out of the index on their own?

As for the unclosed title and style tags. I don't see what you mean. To me they seem to be perfectly fine, and he haven't encountered any problems with these before.

Cheers

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Adrian

In regards to the other tags, I take it back, it was Chrome's view source code coloring, made tags look broken at quick glance. Sorry!

As far as the canonical, I was just curious why there are two URLs for that page to begin with? Is it that you need the '1850' in the URL to provide the GET call to the database?

It appears as if all your category level pages operate this way?  You should be able to get a singular, clean URL and make your category call without the need for duplicate pages at all.

If this is not the case, you may want to 301 Redirect the '1850' page to the other page. There doesn't seem to be a need for both pages to be accessible by users.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

[johnshearer]

Adrian,

We always see an initial high ranking that last about a week then goes back down sometimes a few pages..Over a 2 month period we see the ranking usually restore.

[PaulFraserCollectibles]

Hey everyone.

Can I just add something else. I changed the text on another page, adding more information about the service the company provides. The page is titled "Investment Newsletter" it was page 3 Google UK for that term and had been for a while.

It went up to page 2. And now its dropped away somewhere. This change was implemented over a week ago.

Why is this happening? Surely it shouldn't be a result of me changing the content on the page?

I've never seen anything on SEOMoz to suggest that improving a pages content will lose my rank in Google.

Any suggestions?

Can I also add, that we changed the Meta description on the home page from being the same as the title:

"Latest news from the world of high-end collectibles and investments"

to

"Free daily news for collectors plus antiques, memorabilia and investment-grade collectibles for sale."

This has seen us drop from 5th place on the 1st page in the UK. to the 3rd page on Google.

But the Meta description only has limited SEO effect and surely this is a change for the better?

[PaulFraserCollectibles]

We used to use a different style URL which just included the docid and catid. At this point we manually entered friendly URL redirects in the CMS.

At the beginning of this month we converted to an automatic friendly url system. The url is generated from the article title. Old urls now use the rel="canonical" to direct to the correct page which is always of the format:

www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/category/article-title/0000.page

I'm not entirely sure if we have the ability to make 301 redirects.