Made on On-Page SEO Change and my Rankings Fell. What Should I Do?

[mj22]

I figured id ask this here, its been over a year and a half since i have worked with a new domain. I made a rookie mistake (facepalm). I have a site that is 5-6 months old and the project got delayed for 2 months due to personal reasons. Anyway i enabled SE's to crawl and started rocking links at it sept1, everything was going fine, i started pulling up for 40+ longtail money keywords, business as usual. On oct 5th i happend to notice that on the root url/homepage (which was ranking for these kws - no its not a emd/partial match/sniper site. long story of what is going on, ill explain more when i launch my journal on this project) there was no h1 tag/heading. instead what was supposed to be an h1 was an h2, i went in and changed it to h1 as soon as i noticed it. 2 days later that page gets recrawled and recached and boom... TANKED. lol

I guess im more curious as to how long this will take to unfuck itself.

I honestly didnt think it would make much of an impact as far as rankings go but i guess i was wrong. Either way the change/correction needed to be made i felt and better now than later when im fighting for top spots for that pages kws.

any insight or info on this would be appreciated. thanks in advance.

 

[secretagentdad]

I do not have an answer for you but I to have had new sites deranked when using h1.

Try switching it back?

 

[mj22]

Thanks for the reply secretagentdad. I was thinking the same thing if it doesnt snap out of it after a couple weeks. I have some higher end stuff (authority/trust/ect) dripping in starting mid week until the end of the month which im hoping helps.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'd let it sit, @mj22. On-page changes get crawled quickly and the changes are rolled out just as quickly. In this case, though, you've changed a major factor on a page/site that doesn't sound like it has a lot of trust yet. If I was putting my prediction hat on, I would imagine within a week, if not sooner, you'll see it bounce back to where it was and probably not better, but just the same, after a quick re-evaluation of the signals for the page..

One of the reasons these bounces occur is because you're showing you're an SEO by changing SEO factors. If you revert it or keep testing, you're proving you're an SEO. The move is to wait and do nothing until the algorithm settles and has decided you're not a "bad SEO". Then you can tweak again if you want.

 

[mj22]

thanks ryu, i was thinking the same thing. i appreciate the confirmation. im going back to aged domains after this one haha. Its been a while for me on these new sites.

 

[mj22]

Ok, so this thought has been rattling around in my head since the change. (still no recovery). originally the page did not have any h1 at all, only h2's and so on. (i know its a rookie mistake and im an idiot for overlooking it in the first place.) Since there was no h1, by changing the h2 to an h1 when there was none cause a possible overoptimization issue by adding a new relevance factor/signal (an h1 when there was no h1 prior) to the page?

Note: The meta title and h1 are not the same in this instance on this page. No content or headings or subheadings were edited in any way only the h2 to h1 change.

Im interested to hear your guy's thoughts.

 

[secretagentdad]

Now you’ve got me head scratching a bit.
How many words of content on the page?
How many pages on the site?

Is it possible your site has some kinda soft flag?

I’ve had Inadvertent success with h2s where I didn’t expect it with over link built sites and my stuff in the IM niche that gets spammed constantly.

Did you run anything like Zora on it? What did it suggest.

Sorry to ask so many questions.
I’ve run into this enough I think it’s worth head scratching over. Might reveal something neat about how google classes relevancy vs over-optimization at a page level.

 

[mj22]

Now you’ve got me head scratching a bit.
How many words of content on the page?
How many pages on the site?

1100 words on the homepage/page in question
60 pages

Is it possible your site has some kinda soft flag?

It might be, i hate to say it but ive been watching some of our links hit in and it IS acting like some new client sites i have had brought to me that i had to fix that were penalized. target url flashing in and out of serp for partial match brand kw as links are getting picked up/hitting in. Obviously im just speculating. When it got re cached and the root tanked for the kws it was pulling up for, also the 3-4 internal pages that were ranking in the 40's -50's for some longtails either fell out of the top 100 or are now sitting in the 60 -100 positions. When you search the brand name of the site it is in pos 1 with 4 sitelinks.

Some may wonder if it is a off page issue, i am 99.9% sure it is not as i have ran and do run these same links im running now to my other sites and client sites with no issues at all, nothing but gains from them. No exact match or partial anchors targeted to the target url, only branded, generic and naked url anchors. I rarely target exact match or partial match anchors anymore, if i do i wont until the link profile is beefed with generics, branded, nakeds ect.

Did you run anything like Zora on it? What did it suggest.

No i havent, i dont have the woo, i suppose ill have to get it one of these days. I have been using serpfox, its cheap and does what i need it to do.

Sorry to ask so many questions.
I’ve run into this enough I think it’s worth head scratching over. Might reveal something neat about how google classes relevancy vs over-optimization at a page level.

No worries about the questions, i appreciate the feedback/reply.
I plan on waiting it out until the end of the month or so once this months link campaign is done and the dust settles, if i get no positive action ill probably be changing it back to the way it was and continue grinding away. Ill keep this thread updated with any positive or negative changes.

Also when i get back to the office ( i am away for a week or so helping a buddy with late soybean harvest) i plan on setting up a verified shop linking back to the site on google merchant center (trust signals) since this is an ecom site, before i make any changes. If it is just a sandbox of some kind due to changes being made on such a new site my thoughts are doing the above may help spring it loose. I have done this before a while back for a site that was having issues indexing and after i did the whole site was indexed within a few days, so who knows lol

 

[mj22]

lol

Edit/addition: who needs competition? I am kicking my own ass over here... bwahahaha

 

[mj22]

I figured id give this an update. Close to the end of the month (Oct) i made the change back to what it was prior, I still have no clue if i triggered a filter causing it to be overoptimized, or if i just got put into the sandbox. I ran some higher end stuff, dr60+ guest posts and niche edits, edus, wikipedia link ect at it and the site wouldnt not move at all, it would flash up like it was stuck while links were hitting in then settle back down. so who knows wtf was going on. it acted like a penalty to me, but again i have no idea.

Since then i did go thru @Ryuzaki 's kitchen sink method around Nov 1st. i DID notice i had 2 category page titles similarly optimized with the root url that tanked. All products that are on the site are closely related/relevant to each other. I cleaned those titles up so there was no confusion with the page titles fearing there could be a kw cannibalization issue possibly going on.

As of the latest core update, the root url and internal pages have sprang back even higher than before and seem to be holding, even landed a handful of page ones for smaller traffic keywords.

If it is ranking, dont fuck with it is my conclusion and always quadruple check your work with a fine toothed comb, those inner pages optimized that way could have been holding the site back.

Thanks for the feedback guys and thanks Ryuzaki for that kitchen sink post, was a great check list to go through.