Fresh content has had a negative affect on SERPs

[Paul78]

Hi there,

I was ranking pretty well for highly competitive keywords without actually doing any link building please see graph attached, so I thought I have an opportunity here in getting to page 1 for these keywords, the plan was to write fresh & original content for these pages, because hey Google loves fresh content, right?

Well it seems NOT, after one week of these pages been re-written (21st Feb 2012), all of these pages dropped all together, please note: all the pages were under the same directory:

/health/flu/keyword-1

/health/flu/keyword-2 and so on...

I have compared both pages as I have back ups of the old content

• On Average there are more words on each of the new pages compared to previous pages
• Lower bounce rate by at least 30% (Via Adwords)
• More time on site by at least 2 minutes (Via Adwords)
• More page visits (Via Adwords)
• Lower keyword density, on average 4% (new pages) compared to 9% (old content) across all pages

So since the end of February, these pages are still not ranked for these keywords, the funny thing is, these keyword are on page 1 of Bing.

Another NOTE: We launched an irish version of the website, using the exact same content, I have done all the checks via webmaster tools making sure it's pointing to Ireland, I have also got hreflang tags on both website (just in case)

If anyone can help with this that would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

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[Andropenis_Australia]

Hello, You will not rank well on G without backlinks, sometimes new sites do get a temp boost early in their life because of the fresh content. The same content in another language can trigger duplicate content issues, also look into your directory/url addresses because the content should be relative to the directory name etc. Hope you figure it out, if worse comes to worse you can also roll back your changes and observe ?

[KeriMorgret]

Howdy! Just wanted to point out this question is several months old.

The statement about "The same content in another language can trigger duplicate content issues" was a bit surprising to hear. Can you provide some more information about that?

I'm more accustomed to what Google says in places like http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#3 where they state "Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag."

Matt Cutts also talks about it being OK in a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ.

I'm also interested in knowing more about content needing to be relative to the directory name. Can you give a few more details?