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Am I Screwed Now? : (

by Branlan17
12 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a site in a competitive niche that had slowly worked it's way to the bottom of page one. I changed the layout altogether and made it a blog style page. It dissappeared from the SERPs for over two weeks and fearing I'd done something wrong I copied the text from all these posts, and put it on a static homepage, deleting the individual blog post pages.

The next day my site was #4 but in the cache google still thought i had the blog setup. The next day it dissappeared again and that was nearly a month ago. It's still indexed (and so are the pages that no longer exist) but has been gone from the first 1,000 pages for that keyword for almost a month.

Should I try to switch it back? This was my highest earning site when it was getting traffic and it's gone to almost nothing : /
#screwed
  • Profile picture of the author Branlan17
    I guess my biggest fear is that Google already has that content ranked on different pages and thinks my homepage has the "secondary" copy of this content.
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  • Profile picture of the author Capitalist_Pig
    You cab use webmaster tools to go in and manually request that the old pages be removed - but you should really be using 301 redirects to point to he new content anyhow. Making a change won hurt you longterm, as long as you redirect.

    What likely happened is that all your backlinks pointed to the old pages, and now that they're gone, you aren't getting credit for them.

    Another possibility is that you have broken links from the transition. Google *hates* broken internal links.
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  • Profile picture of the author Branlan17
    No there are no broken internal links, this blog USED to be what you got when you typed in my homepage URL, but now you hit the static page instead, same url though. The only broken links to this content is from the Google cached links I'm just afraid of being punished for having the same content on my homepage... do I need to be?
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      You are not being penalized. You are just being swirled around a bit
      because you have really changed the dynamics of your site.

      If at all possible, putting everything back together may be something
      I would do.

      But, I would think hard before trying. I would definitely make a custom
      404 page with links to everything. Then, I might think of how I can
      make lemonade out of the lemons. Work with the site a bit. In other
      words, think about it as starting over and do it better than ever.
      That may pay off in the long run. Smile and be determined.

      The fact that you have waited so long means that the option of
      putting stuff back may be moot.

      Consider it a lesson learned. If something works, keep it intact and
      just do some tweaks.

      No duplicate content issue at all.

      Good luck with this one!

      Paul
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      If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      [DELETED]
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      • Profile picture of the author Branlan17
        Thanks everyone for your replies!

        I'm guessing, because it is the same content but google is likely confused by it being on a different URL now, that hopefully I'll be able to get back to the top again. I may, as has been suggested, just re-write the whole homepage with fresh content, this site has hundreds to thousands of backlinks (not even counting deep links) so I should get ranked again it just might take a while in a competitive niche like this.
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  • Profile picture of the author Net Assasin
    two words.... Google Dance
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  • Profile picture of the author Branlan17
    I actually created all my sites with a Weebly pro account so I'm not sure I can utilize the 404 like WP
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  • Profile picture of the author bitriot
    This probably is of little solace but I have one site that bounces from google page 3 to google page 40 every other day. Way annoying.
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  • Profile picture of the author Branlan17
    My problem is that maybe Google is just taking its time and changing the content may just cause me to go through this all over again. I think I'll give it some time before changing the content to see if I bounce back without having to change things around.
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  • Profile picture of the author Billy Rey
    you will be back. probably 3 months depending on your linking strategy.

    Sudden changes in site structures usually lead to this. Nothing to worry about
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    ✔✔✔Leapfroggr Digital Marketing+SEO Services✔✔✔
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