Is the Sandbox Real? Need Help!

[mrsmelmitch]

To start, I'm very new at this so I've likely made a ton of mistakes but here is the breakdown of what's happened/what's been done to my site.

I own a wedding photography company which was based in Portland, we decided about six months prior that we wanted to relocate to San Diego.  It was too soon to optimize our website for our new town of San Diego so I created a brand new site. It was born around June 2011.  It looks just like the old site but all the content is different (different titles, re-uploaded images, text, etc was optimized for San Diego).  What may be my pitfall is I imported our blog posts from the old site to the new site and we continued to keep both blogs live (writing the post in one, importing to the other).

San Diego site: http://continuumweddings.com

Old Site (now optimized for LA): http://continuumphotography.com

From there I began link building.  I signed up for the SEO Scheduler and began making the changes suggested there.  It told me to sign up for Linxboss, and I did it.  Other than that, my links have been build naturally and I have quite a few of them, definitely enough to compete with my top competitors.

At one point I was #3 for "San Diego Wedding Photographer" and I stayed there for a couple weeks.  Then I began to drop.  Now I'm somewhere on page 10.

I've read a lot of articles on here and I know I have a lot of things potentially hurting me. Site age, Duplicate content, etc.  I'm just not sure why I dropped (still rank on 1st page in Yahoo & Bing) and what I should do about it.  I tend to get overwhelmed and every post I read seems to talk about something new I may have done wrong.  I'm willing to put in the time to fix this; I just need to know where my time is best spent.

[mrsmelmitch]

Wow, this is really great advice!  I'll get to work on your suggestions ASAP!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Melissa,

I took a quick look (please note this is not a truly comprehensive site audit, so it's only going to touch on the most fundamental issues).

When I compare ContinuumPhotography.com and ContinuumWeddings.com I see serious issues.  Duplicate content across main site pages (such as your Home page, and main Weddings and Engagements pages) is at the top of the list.  Simply taking entire paragraphs of text and changing out the geographic location, or adding a few other words around that is not SEO best practices.  You need to have truly unique content.

Main pages linked to from a site's home page also require quality depth of content as well.  So for example http://continuumweddings.com/san-diego-wedding-photos is a page linked from the home page yet lacks any depth of content.  In fact, the majority of pages linked from each home page have little to no significant unique content at all.

Next issue: When I go to the Weddings page on ContinuumPhotography.com, the page Title is Los Angeles focused, yet rolling over the photos, I see references to Portland, Denver, Mississippi, etc.  All of these only dilute the Los Angeles focus, further weakening the already diluted paragraph based content that's essentially a duplicate to the other site's Weddings page.

Given how competitive both the Los Angeles and the San Diego markets are for photography based web sites, extensive on-site unique content optimization is critical.

Having articles listed on http://www.continuumweddings.com/sandiegoweddings/ (such as the Sample Wedding Day Timeline article) have a link like: http://www.continuumweddings.com/sandiegoweddings/tips/wedding-day-timeline-template  but in fact clicking on that causes a redirect to http://continuumweddings.com/tips/wedding-timeline  is also problematic.  Even though the link is set up with a proper redirect command, the original content in the "San Diego" version makes it appear to supposedly be about San Diego, yet it's not.

On top of that, the intro to that article is duplicate content across multiple locations.

Another thing I found is you've got a Google Places listing in San Diego, but you don't seem to have one in Los Angeles, which you should definitely have.

A serious, focused effort needs to take place to build truly unique content across each site you hope to rank for.  From there, you need highly relevant, geographic based link campaigns conducted so as to obtain inbound links to each site from other high quality sites in each respective geographic location.  But first, the on-site work is vital.