Skip to main content

I Made My Article More “Trustworthy” and Lost Rankings

I had an article ranking on page 1 in Google.

Recently, I watched a video from Edward Sturm about improving SEO by adding outbound links to authoritative sources. It made sense, so I went back and updated the article.

Before, I had references to medical studies, but they were just mentioned in text, not clickable. I changed that and added proper outbound links (dofollow) to reputable sites like WebMD and NHS.

The content itself didn’t change. Same structure, same intent, same information. The only real difference was making those references clickable and more “legit”.

Four days later, the article dropped from page 1 to page 2, around position 16.

I’m honestly trying to understand what happened.

Did adding those links somehow dilute the page’s focus? Did it shift the perceived intent from practical to more academic? Or was it just a re-evaluation after Google recrawled the page?

What’s interesting is that before, with no active links, it was ranking just fine. After improving the references and pointing to high-authority sources, it dropped.

This seems to go against the usual advice that linking out to trusted sources helps with credibility and SEO.

Curious if anyone else has experienced something similar after adding outbound links.

Right now it just feels like I improved the article and got a worse result.

submitted by /u/KetoByDanielDumitriu
[link] [comments]

from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/xthjkBU
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Local seo vs. natiowide seo?

I've done SEO for local businesses but I recently got my first client that sells an item nation wide. ​ Any suggestions for doing nationwide SEO? ​ I am used to making geopages for local towns. I was going to do the same with some input from the client about what cities or towns he would like to show up in? submitted by /u/Letmeinterviewyou [link] [comments] from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News http://bit.ly/2JHy0k0
Post a Comment
Read more

Clients site has a weird issue with 302 redirects that I haven't seen before.

Site is in Drupal, hosted on Amazon CDN & Cloudflare. So here's a quick breakdown: The site itself works normally. It's a bit dated, but you can click on links and navigate around as you'd expect. Seeing no obvious issues, I run a Screaming Frog crawl to begin my audit. Only 5 pages were picked up by the crawl which was super weird, since all internal links are regular html and there shouldn't be any issues. So I go through the site and manually collect a bunch of URLs, which I submit to SF again as a list. Every single link bar the 5 originally crawled return a 302, with the 'redirect' pointing back to the home page. Except as I said, those pages don't browser redirect. Browser side, they work fine. I guess they redirect the crawl bot though, since the rest of the site is functionally invisible. Other tools I've looked at say that the pages return simultaneous 302 and 200s, which doesn't make too much sense. These 302s are also old enough ...
Post a Comment
Read more