I have been working on the code and page format of my site http://www.quoteforinsurance.com. I noticed a big drop in SERPs since the changes were made. Is this normal and can I expect a rebound? Or is this a sign that Google dislikes the changes I've made? Most of the changes were cleaning up the code, table alignments and a reformat of the quote box on the right of the screen. The cleanup dropped about 5K on the pages from 16K to 10-11K. I did drop some of the text as well as I was told it was overkill. I have changed about half of the 240 pages thus far, but I wanted to be sure that there were no problems before I finished them up as I am doing the changes manually. META tags were not changed on any pages and Google has Cached the updated pages. I am asking this because I have also been aggressively building links for the site over the past 5-6 weeks and I wasn't sure if a BL or PR update was going on that could be the cause.
If you removed text and dropped in the SERPs, I'd say there's a good chance that that contributed to the drop. Google loves text. Google doesn't know what "overkill" is... Most marketing is 'overkill' to those familiar with the product. I'd re-evaluate putting your content back in... -- Derek
Yeah, I am wondering the same. I posted my site in the Website Review section and was told by a couple of folks that it appeared that I was keyword stuffing and by keyword density was too high. Was told to bust the contnt up over a couple of pages. So I did. Now I wonder if it was a mistake.
I change my content regularly and Google never seems to have any problem with it. This holds for Yahoo and MSN. If a web page is indexed daily, a drop in the SERPS is possible because Google is seeing different content. If the cache is current and the SERPS have dropped, Google probably dislikes the content, for that term.
I am trying to target auto insurance, car insurance, health insurance, medical insurance, home insurance, and life insurance mainly with variations of those terms. The keyword density of the term "insurance" was 29% and the other ones above ranged from 8-11%. Now the term insurance is at 20% while the others range from 3%-6%
I have loaded the content I took out back in with some minor changes. I increased the frequency of the word insurance to 32.8%, and raised the other terms to 4%-8.72%. Looking at the terms for the top ranked sites they have keyword densities in the 25% range to 45% range. But the word count is lower thus raising the percentage