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Using Free Templates and Its Impact on SEO
- Thread starter ddwebguru
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I never thought the design would impact SEO but I've had an odd experience recently.
I put up 4 sites using the same slightly modified template & all 4 of them were nowhere to be seen in Google.
2 of them did initially show up around page 1 & 2 then suddenly dropped like a brick to about page 30.
I did a bit of investigating, changed the <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC bit of the code, and hey presto 2 of them have re-appeared.
Just waiting for the other 2 to be crawled & we'll see what happens.
I put up 4 sites using the same slightly modified template & all 4 of them were nowhere to be seen in Google.
2 of them did initially show up around page 1 & 2 then suddenly dropped like a brick to about page 30.
I did a bit of investigating, changed the <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC bit of the code, and hey presto 2 of them have re-appeared.
Just waiting for the other 2 to be crawled & we'll see what happens.
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It may be your changes that made the difference. But it's also fairly common for new sites to initially rank highly in G, then drop like a stone, then reappear a little later at a more "normal" level
Cheers, Jon
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I think that's a symptom of their success rather than a cause of it.
It's a bit like saying, "I've never seen a celebrity shopping in Tesco's. Therefore shopping in Tesco's prevents you from becoming a celebrity"
Cheers, Jon
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Yes thats true. I have some sites that appear & just stay there and others that appear then disappear then reappear later.
This one has now disappeared again so God (or Google) only knows whats happening with it.
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I like your reason very much. Now I will try out find the exact reasons rather than scrutinizing its symptoms.
I would have thought that providing your template allows you to do the obvious SEO stuff - sprinkle keywords through title tags, h1-h6 tags, urls, image names, alt text content etc - that it should have no negative impact on the SEO. Obviously, a large part of SEO is the links.
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