Why Would Optimizing Existing Content Cause Rankings To Drop?

by | Jul 28, 2022 | Blog Content, For Writers, SEJ, SEO | 0 comments

What would cause search rankings to drop after updating content?

by Miranda Miller, for Search Engine Journal

If only good intentions drove results in SEO.

Sadly, that’s not the case, as Tamar from Israel discovered recently. She submitted the following to Ask An SEO:

“Help! I just started working at a start-up. The blogs are a horrible mess for many reasons, but there are about 20 blogs out of the 140 that are converting a few people to try our software.

I wanted to do the minimum to optimize them, so I corrected all of the H-titles, made sure each post had a meta description, and checked that any images had an alt tag.

In less than a day, ALL of these blogs lost their position for the main keywords they were ranking for, according to Google Search Console. What gives?!

I can’t find an explanation for this anywhere! Almost all of them dropped by at least 20-30 in position for a keyword… going from #9, for example, to #55 for a top query. Please help.”

Although Tamar did submit the domain, we have no insight into which 20 of the 140 blogs indexed we’re discussing here.

Further, we have no context as to which keywords she was ranking on and lost positioning for.

Were this my client, those would be the first things I would want to…

Originally published on Search Engine Journal. Click here to continue reading

 

Miranda is a full-time writer and marketer with 18 years of experience helping enterprise brands, government agencies, and NPOs tell more compelling stories. She spends part of the year in Canada and the rest as a part-time digital nomad, chasing sunshine and happiness around the planet.
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