Loss in Ranking After Optimisation

Hi Everyone,

Looking for a little bit of advice.

I have been optimising a series of new pages recently which have been ranking rather well but have recently dropped from the SERPs quite a lot.

Two such pages are:

http://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/alli.html

&

http://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/lipobind.html

The keywords we are targeting are alli and lipobind respectively.

Using alli as an example; before optimisation all we had has was the word 'alli' in an <h1> tag and the 3 paragraphs of text that are also there. There were no pictures at all.

We have now added the pictures to the page with correct alt tags and made other changes to the page as recommended by GaryTheScubaGuy's optimisation sticky.

Before we did all this we were ranking at no.6 on page 1 for 'alli', we are now nowhere. The same for the term 'lipobind'. We have also done some basic link building through article directories, website directories, forum posting and have also managed to get some links added to relevant blogs (not comments).

If one of you could have a look I would be most grateful.

Is it possible that after such wholesale changes you get devalued and after the next crawl we could be back up there?

I took a look through your website, I can see you have adopted a good structure. Your situation, is just a case of links, in respect to links, most of your internal pages PR is sourced from upper level pages, home page onwards.

Remember, that any new links built to lower level pages will take some time to be credited, simply because of the length between Google backlink updates.

Keep building links to these internal pages, use good anchor text, and get as many medical related backlinks as possible.

You should maybe write some guides around these products, and how they work, the results and more. Make some good link bait, it will give an additional boost in the long run,

We have also built a tool to help with link management, take a look at it at ilinkseo.co.uk

Good luck with your link building, again your websites internal structure is quite good, try not to worry about the level of onsite changes, which includes alt tags etc. Good content, and good backlinks will pay off

I think you should wait for another couple of weeks and If it still don't work then rollback the changes.

thanks for your advice chaps

would anyone mind taking a look to see if i've spammed (without meaning to) in those 2 pages mentioned above?

i've tried to include the keyword as much as possible (in the alt tags, comment tags, in the text and meta tags)

i realise onsite changes to the code make little difference in the serps, but i'm trying to optimise in every way possible!

First of all: 1 update is not enough to determine effects of changes. Linkbuilding in the meantime, Algorythm changes and link devaluations can all influence SERP, while you stare at the same black box.

This is fairly transparent to Google, though. Did the relevancy of the alli product description increase by adding those keywords? Nope. The pages are essentially the same semantics, just with a higher percentage of keywords.

Very competative business too, online pharmacy, and perhaps influenced by an entirely different algorythm specifically targetted to separating foreign spam, from legit online pharmacy businesses with something usefull to say/sell.

Even medium to small changes could cause SERP shift in such an environment.

I couldn't give you heartfelt SEO advice in your competative business. Taking back the edge will need unremorsefull tactics, grey at most. Designing a site with the user on the pedestal vs. designing a site that does good in Google should idealogically be the same process.

A competator or a marketing-tired user should be able to navigate your site without frowning at all the obvious and glaring repatitions of keywords. It is about finding natural balanced quality copy. This is very hard with all of your competition balanced the optimised way.

After the third "alli" mention on a page, Google and a general user will know what you are talking about. For the user only, I'd stick with natural flowing language, and still hope Google will follow suit, even in such a killing competative field. Else giving a penalty for "over-optimizing" (or rather "vandalising") a site and dropping a site for the rarer mention of a keyword will create an akward and stupid situation: just find the sweet spot between over and under and you are in the lead. While search results should be about finding quality content that is usefull for a user. Not repeated every 7 words in a strong tag.

What I do wonder now is: How is long tail doing? Did you find an increase in SERP for long tail searches? In Holland your site scores decently even for searches like "60mg hard capsule" and the like. Searches curiously void of the repeated keyword alli.

tl;dr Hire a SEO consultant and let them devise a plan suited to your niche and domain(s).

thank you for your detailed response, longtail searches appear to be ok, but obviously not as good as we would like!

Hi

you optimize your site well but you need do some off-page activity also which support in ranking . in some cases only on page boost your rank but in many case you need to do off-page activity with on-page activity also .