It seems I've gotten this question a lot lately so I thought I'd address it here.

Several people have questioned why their rankings have dropped after dramatically changing the copy on pages of their site. This is extremely typical. With almost every site I've re-written copy for, the revised pages would move (in some direction) immediately following the changes.

Some would immediately rise in ranking. Many would drop in ranking. Some would seem to disappear. Then, after an undefined amount of time, they'd come back up, usually in a higher position than before.

Since engines are text machines and since the information they gather from your site is all in your text, it makes sense that extensive copy changes would also bring about rankings changes.

If you change your copy drastically, don't be surprised (or alarmed) if your pages drop or even vanish for a little while. It's not the Google police punishing you and you haven't likely been banned. It's just part of the re-indexing process as far as I've been able to tell so rest easy.

Thanks for that, Karon.

It's so easy to get ramped up about position changes with all of the conspiracy theories and technical glitch worries. Nice reality check.

Your words are a comfort. :cool:

That helps me out too. Just at the beginning of this week I began targeting a slightly broader, more competitive, heavier-trafficked (sp?) keyword phrase. I haven't noticed any changes yet - hopefully they'll be for the better :)

Well, just changing a keyphrase within the same copy won't cause the big change. I'm talking about completely changing all the copy on your home page, etc. "Dramatic" changes, not slight ones.

Maybe a 'rolling change' of content would be prudent. If you have 6 pages ranking well, change 1 a week?

Well, engines rank each page, not your entire site. Drastically changing the content on the page is what I was talking about :)

I suppose you could try to slowly incorporate a little copy onto the page at a time, but who knows if that would work? Seems like a long shot to me.

When making these 'dramatic' changes, do you save the old copy - just in case you fall on your face :D so to speak?

LOL - Sure, you can keep the old copy just in case if it makes you feel better.