One of our sites (shopify, ecommerce) shot up in rankings after all the text based content on collection pages (under the products around 200 words) were removed. Any idea why this might occur? It was optimised content for our target keywords.
I've encountered a similar situation before, and it's possible that removing the text-based content caused an improvement in rankings due to several factors. Sometimes Google's algorithms may favor a cleaner more user-friendly layout, and excessive keyword-optimized content can be seen as spammy. Also if your product images, titles, and metadata are well-optimized for your target keywords, that could be enough to signal relevance to search engines. It's also worthy to consider other SEO factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, and backlinks, as they could have contributed to the rankings boost.
Hi @Oso Optimized Thanks for replying. Apologies for that. Here are some context: The site has been optimized for almost a year now, client has a different web dev team that disclosed they only replaced the "theme" of the site and accidentally removing the keywords we optimised on the bottom of the collection/product page. I don't think it was over-optimized, either. Could it have been a change in the website design that caused this? Or their web host, HTML coding, etc. I am throwing rocks in the dark here, since I have no idea why the rankings went up like that when I was struggling to keep it afloat when I had the optimized keywords in the site. Thank you for your reply, any help is appreciated.
Noice! Thanks so much for this! I've been racking my brains out. This info really helps and lets me understand the issue better.
I've been a full time SEO since 2008, and have never so far seen an increase in ranking, due to deleting quality content. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but I must suspect some of the content was duplicated. Maybe it was copied and pasted from another source? Or maybe keyword focus conflicted with actual products offered.. There are some other unlikely variables, like if you were on a server with a lot of spammy sites. But I don't think I can add much without doing some extensive research on the site. I guess just count your blessings
It could have been a number of things that caused this. 1. Over optimized content 2. Duplicate content 3. Poor quality content 4. Ranking State/Quality threshold improvement Replacing something major like a Theme will "force" Google to re-evaluate the entire site quickly. Every site will also have a Ranking state range and Quality threshold tier that gets updated during Core Updates. The other ways this gets updated sooner is from major changes or high percentage(30%+) of content added/deleted on a site. After changing the Theme, Google re-evaluated the site and it may have increased a quality threshold tier or entered a higher ranking state range. The new theme could have improved techincal seo aspects like page loading speed, core web vitals, etc, as well. It's hard to say for sure without having historical data on the site in question.