Did I accidentally compete with my own post??

[Ronnie]

So I know google tends to rank new pages extremely high in the first few days, and then they often fall. so that could be what happened here...

But I'm not sure.

I made a blog post. Lets say it's called "best ice skating moves". It ranked very well, and stayed high up in the rankings on page 1.

I figured it was so successful, why not make anotehr post. I called it "best ice skating moves, part II". big mistake obviously. now the 2nd post is ranked on the 2nd page. and the original post is down on page 5.

Any idea what happened? Obviously it was a big mistake doing what I did. What's the best way to fix it, should I delete the "part II' post and hope everything goes back to how it was??

[DeanRichards]

Obviously it was a big mistake doing what I did.

Fortunately for you, that's an incorrect assumption based on incomplete information.

Rule number one... correlation is not causation. Just because it started raining right after I washed my car doesn't mean that washing my car caused the rain.

There are at least 200 ranking factors and the "weight" of those factors changes daily, so it's simply not possible to point at one thing and say that it caused your rank to go up or down. Ranking is far too complicated for such a simple idea to be valid.

So I know google tends to rank new pages extremely high in the first few days, and then they often fall. so that could be what happened here...

Yep. You knew the right answer, you just didn't believe it in your heart and the stress of seeing your rank fall made you doubt it.

should I delete the "part II' post and hope everything goes back to how it was??

Definitely not. More content is always better than less content. Stay the course and keep following The Challenge process.

If you're brutally honest with yourself, was your page 1 rank really valid, given your competition? Very few new sites really belong on page 1, so be glad you got some traffic, look at your analytics carefully to see what you can learn from those visitors and then keep on keeping on.

Basically what you've posted tells me that you're doing good and everything is happening as it should.

[Ronnie]

^Thanks for the response. Lots of good advice/wisdom in there.