Losing Positions

[JarnoNijzing]

HELP!!!

after implementing some changes suggested by SEOMoz Pro the only changed is that i lost some very very very dear positions. I had expected that my website would raise in position due to the changes but in fact it lost some.

I live in the netherlands so i use Google NL and Bing NL for rank tracking.

For some specific keywords like: kamperen bij de boer, boerderijcampings, boerencampings, Vekabo Campings, minicampings, kampeerartikelen, boerencamping frankrijk

i only lost positions and thus visitors. Some of the keywords lost about 9 positions.

What am i doing wrong? I do everything SEOMoz suggested including changing 301 titles on my website due to titletags with more then 70 characters and the only thing that happens is losing positions? Duplicate content is no longer an issue. No errors were found what so ever and still in stead of improving the rankings the declined.

Who can help me because this is not what i expected from this program.

[Aran_Smithson]

If you have made quite a wide range of changes it may take a while for Google to index all of the new changes and allocate your new SERP. Be patient and hopefully things will look up.

I often see a small dip in my serps prior to gaining some good ground.

Could it be that you have been penalised in the layout update? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Your Q&A title reminds me of the R.E.M song "Losing my religion" (replace religion with positions...now sing...)

"That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my positions
Trying to keep up with you"

[JarnoNijzing]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I read the link you seggested and it stated that websites that use a normal amount of ads in comparison to text above the fold will not be affected. I think i use a normal amount of it and changed so accordingly. Normally i use 1

of text, then a table with picture and adsense then more content.

i changed this to 2

of text and then the table with picture and adsenses.

Would this be helpfull?

So you're advising to be patient and wait for the changes to take affect? How long should i wait for something like that to take affect? It's been over 1 week that i made the changes and google visited my site again after the changes.

i'm realllllly unpatient as you can imagine. I make about 21K on adsenses each year. If my positions drop so will me earnings... That's why i am that unpatient...

[Aran_Smithson]

I can see your reason for impatience!

Unfortunately there is no definite amount of time to wait before deciding something hasn't worked, though if Google has deep crawled your site since the changes and your still suffering, it may be time to look elsewhere.

There may be other factors in play.

Hows your link profile looking?

Has anything else change in recent weeks?

Have your competitors upped they're game on the run up to summer?

[JarnoNijzing]

My link profile is updated on regular basis. All the camping sites on my website have to link to me in order to obtain their own page on my website. This way i "naturally" build a great link asset. Unfortunatly Google decided that this way of linking is not always best for your ranking but i can see no other way of doing this for the campingsites.

i also make sure i get non-reciptorial links and article links to my site.

When i look at my competitors i see them having way more links then i do but they always have had that since the start of my site in 2007.

for my searchword: kamperen bij de boer i now rank nr 2 in Google NL but in Google Com i rank number 1 (maybe due to the .nl or .com extention of the site). But the number one in the netherlands for that term does not even include it in it's title, content, header, h1,h2,h3,h4 or even links and alt descriptions. So why i that now ranked 1?? i can only come to the conclusing that it must be because my website was penalised due to something stupid google made up recently.

On the webmasters forum i asked about the recent google update and i got these 2 answers:

• To be honest, looking at your website and just the physical space taken up by adverts is more than the content on the page.This looks bad but its even worse when the adds that appear are just text adds.You use 3 add blocks.Remove the top one and keep the 2nd and 3rd. Remember, you only get a "click" from one advert being hit, so you are not loosing anything, you still have the adds appearing.The big difference is that the user is not now sown a page of adverts that confuses them.
• Combination of ad placement and site design is on the brink of being deceptive. I wouldn't know at first glance which link is an ad and which one not.

What do you think i should do?

my sites adres is: http://www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com

maybe you don't understand the language written on the site but you sure can see the site. Maybe look into which resolution would be best to test?

hope to hear from you again

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Jamo,

Thanks for the detailed explanation of what is happening on your site. Let's start at the beginning. You say your rankings recently dropped. There could be several obvious explanations.

1. Changed title tags. Title tags are one of the most important on-page ranking factors. If you changed your title tags too much, you might have lost some rankings there. Generally, the first few words of a title tag are the most important - the closer a word is to the beginning the more weight it carries. So if you changed a lot of words at the beginning of you titles, you may have gotten yourself in trouble. On the other hand, if you mostly changed words at the end of the title tags, this probably did little harm.

2. An algorithm change. It's possible Google Panda or the Page Layout update threw an algorithmic penalty at you. As others have mentioned, if this is the case, the only solution is to fix your layout, wait several weeks and hope for the best.  Oh, and read this:  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/donna-on-big-adsense-earners

3. Something else? Unfortunately, any change you made on-site, changes in your backlink profile and changes in the algorithm, or a combination of these factors could have caused your site to drop. We've seen a lot of turbulence in the SERPs the past year and Google is really shaking things up.

Sometimes you can't figure it out, no matter what you do. In this case, it's best to move forward and continue to build a site worth visiting. Sometimes you can't fix what went wrong, but you can always build something better.