Did I over-optimized?

[MeEatBrains]

Hey guys,

I started to work on 1.5 years old local business site. The previous SEO guy have done some on-page and off-page. There was things that needed to be changed. I improved the page speed from 3-4s to 1-2s and lowered TTFB from 1.5s to 200-400ms. (browser cahing, I also used W3 Total Cache, compressed imgs etc.)

After that, I found out that there were not a single H1 on the site. The theme was injecting the <title> in <h2> on all the inner pages, but not on home page, so I thought why not change <title> to <h1> instead of <h2>. I have some sites coded that way and they perform ok.

The thing is that after the change, the main KWs which are ranking on the home page, dropped with 10-25 positions. It is interesting that all the inner pages now have the <title> as <h1> and their rankings remained pretty much the same. The home page still don't have <h1> though.

- How do you think, is it possible that G considered this change like some sort of over-optimization signal. Should I wait few days and see if the KWs will bounce back, or should I change the previous setting and manually add H1s similar to the title and remove the injection of the <title> in <h2>?

- Do you think that the reason could be, the HTML/CSS/JS minification done by the caching plugins? Could this be some sort of problem, if they messed up the code or something? After the caching there were one cosmetic CSS issue on one of the elements so I needed to fix it.

I hope someone to give a hand. Thanks.

 

[CCarter]

Should I wait few days

You need to wait at least 4 weeks mate. It could be just Google re-evaluating your SEO and playing chicken with you. They have a patent, Application: 11170786 - Jun 30, 2005, where they'll temporarily drop rankings after a website has been updated then wait and see if the website owner changes it back. If the website owner changes the change back the rankings drop even FURTHER. If the website owner doesn't change it back, the rankings usually rebound and may go even higher.

I wrote about this in the past but here is another article about the patent: The Great Google Fakeout Patent: Let’s Hoodwink The Spammers and SEO’s Too!

Basically in any on-page scenario you should wait about 4-8 weeks IMO before seeing whether the changes was successful or not.

 

[Ryuzaki]

No, I don't think that's over-optimized, based on what you've said. That's standard practice. You nest your headers, never having an H2 that isn't a sub-header of an H1. I use my title as my H1 as well, no issues here.

I agree that you should let it shake itself out. That's not a major change for most pages, but the H1 and H2 tags are some of the most powerful. On terms where you have a lot of juice and are already up in stiff competition, it could be enough to see a shake up while the changes are re-evaluated.

In the end, I'm sure you'll regain your rankings. You may see slight bumps here or there but for the most part not much will change, and certainly not negatively.

 

[MeEatBrains]

Thanks guys for the help. I guess I will just continue to work on the content and link part as usual.