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Rankings drop after adding new page

fonzi asked 3 years ago
Hi guys, I’m hoping someone could shed some light on an issue I’ve been having with one of my sites.

The site usually sits in the top 5-6 for a few great $ keywords but every time I add a page to the site all $ keywords and long tail keywords drop about 10 places. It only happens when I add a new page, news posts have no affect on rankings at all. The rankings drop normally last 2-3 weeks and then return to normal. At first I thought it was only a fluke so I kept testing it and it keeps happening.

It’s frustrating to know that if I add a page I’ll lose 50% of my organic traffic for a couple of weeks. At the wrong time of the year it’s a big loss.

The site runs on WP.

Any thoughts on why this may be happening and/or how to fix it would be greatly appreciated as I’d like to add more content but I’m afraid to.

Thanks

5 Answers
allfreechips answered 3 years ago
Depends a lot on how many pages your site has, so if its 500+ pages 1 page should not effect the rankings much. If its 25 pages 1 page will have a big impact, and ogf course it has to be 70% unique from your other pages or its a negative.

fonzi answered 3 years ago
I have over 140 pages and I’m pretty much trying to bounce around a bit with new ones. I can’t see how adding a mobile casinos page would hurt the site. Meanwhile I have new pages I want to add piling up because I’m afraid to take another blow. Think I’m going to wait till the end of the month and see where things are at, if there’s no improvement then I’ll go ahead and add them. If there is improvement I’ll wait till the end of July as that has always been my slowest time of year.

Wondering if adding breadcrumbs would help Google and my visitors.

MaRcRaM answered 3 years ago
@fonzi 251859 wrote:

Wondering if adding breadcrumbs would help Google and my visitors.

Depends on if they’re white or wheat. :colgate:

rmeeuwsen answered 3 years ago
Although frustrating, it is very interesting indeed.

If I am looking at the right site, your ‘new page’ is not merely another page but a new major navigational menu item. My guess is that it’s a bigger ‘deal’ for google than we realize. I ain’t no xpert by any means, but it appears the algorithms are recalculating your whole site and then ‘settling down’ to nromal.

(it’s always easy to blame it on google algorithms) <span title=” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

brodog answered 3 years ago
This is interesting… I noticed this happen on some of my smaller static sites (< 100 pages) where I use a sidenav area to list like the latest 20 article titles or similar. I add a new article plus a nav listing for the title to get it to index faster and notice a drop in the serps for the main KWs the site is targeting. I just put it down to experiencing a little serp dance because of the new material on the site. But now that you mention in happens on WP, it might be something to think about. New pages list in the sidebar if you have the “pages” widget active (and plenty of WP users do), but new posts don’t (unless you have the “latest posts” widget active, which most WP don’t). I wonder if when indexing new content on a site, the G-bot sees the new page title as new a link on the homepage and causes a temporary serps drop. Doesn’t seem to happen on larger sites (> 200 pages).