On Tuesday, I received an interesting question from a lady who attended a search engine marketing seminar I spoke at last year. She asks:
I am currently assisting a client to incorporate strategic keywords into their title tags and product copy. I made sure to recommend keyword terms that could be easily integrated into existing copy or via a new header. The overall change in the copy would be very slight, yet they are extremely concerned (based on past experience with a developer) that this will negatively impact that page’s rankings. Thus, they are considering adding the new copy to the top of the page, and pushing down old copy so that the search engine crawlers will recognize the page content. What is your opinion on this approach? It’s certainly not very user-friendly for the actual site visitors.
Here’s what I said:
I’ve seen significant copy changes completely take people out of the top 30 and I’ve seen it have virtually no effect. Same with slight changes. About a year ago, just about every site I worked on that had any copy changed got taken out of their current placement. About 95% of those pages came back at the same or higher rankings later, but a few had worse placement. That doesn’t seem to be happening much anymore, however. I always thought Google must have had some sort of reassessment filter in play. Anyway, you won’t know what’s going to happen until you try. And if it doesn’t turn out the way you/they want, put the old copy back up.
As for the question about putting new copy at the top of the page so the engines can find/recognize it… don’t bother. The spiders and bots will find the copy regardless of where it is on the page. They travel at the speed of light and it won’t take them but a millisecond to digest the content on the entire page. Moving newer copy to the top isn’t necessary.
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It’s amazing how the simplest of changes can send a page plummeting in the rankings. It does seem as if ranking soon restore to their original position or even better. Still many clients seem to panic when it happens. I always have to remind them that organic SEO is like a marathon, not a sprint.
I don’t find that happening as much as I used to. It was almost a given for years. Now, it’s more like a 60/40 chance that rankings will change due to content alterations. I think whatever type of reassessment filter Google was using has been tweaked. But that’s just my guess. No one has ever confirmed it.