If you recall, late last week, I made a number of small changes to this site to see if I could gain back some of the google juice we recently lost. I think our drop in position is related to a decision I made to reduce the number of words on the site’s home page. I made some tweaks to the home page layout to accommodate longer post excerpts.
Five days have passed, so I thought I’d have a look at the search results to see if we’re ranking any higher for “blog design”. We are, but only by a single spot. However, looking at the cached versions of our site on Google, I see that the site hasn’t actually be indexed in about 6 days. So, the changes to the home page aren’t yet being reflected. Should be interesting to see what happens. As a side note, the search results for “blog design” are very volatile. I see a lot of change in the listings from day to day.
I’m chomping at the bit to try a couple of other SEO tweaks, but I’m trying to be smart about this by making one change at a time, so it’s effect can be measured.
Next up: waiting to see what effect the home page change has, then diving into meta description. Fun!
It will be interesting to see how much your “on-page” efforts pay off. While I don’t advocate ‘keyword density’ as an SEO measurement, the phrase ‘blog design’ currently only appears 4 times (once in the title), ‘blog’ 55 times and ‘design’ 10 times.
If you changed the content during the redesign making it less ‘relevant’ to that key-phrase then you might find that the ranking less responsive.
If the extended post excerpts don’t relate to those key-terms it would be surprising to expect any significant change.
Thanks for the comment Mike. I did re-write the home page content in the redesign in order to better reflect our broader skills (ie, not just blog work). In that sense,I did make the content less relevant to a search for blog design.
My goal with these content tweaks is to bring that emphasis back. To that end I’ll be tweaking the copy, and making sure the post excerpts are more on target.
BTW, if I don’t have much success with my own experiments, I’ll be looking you up for some professional help!
It is really frustrating sometime waiting for Google to index sites or blog… This happened to my blog… nonetheless i think you should be patience sooner or later you will be indexed.
btw, thanks for visiting my site.