Is the Sandbox Real? Need Help!
-
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.
-
Wow, this is really great advice! I'll get to work on your suggestions ASAP!
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Need for a modified meta-description every page for paginated content?
I'm currently working on a site, where there url structure which is something like: www.domain.com/catagory?page=4. With ~15 results per page. The pages all canonical to www.domain.com/catagory, with rel next and rel prev to www.domain.com/catagory?page=5 and www.domain.com/catagory?page=3 Webmaster tools flags these all as duplicate meta descriptions, So I wondered if there is value in appending the page number to the end of the description, (as we have with the title for the same reason) or if I am using a sub-optimal url structure. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages0 -
Blog is outranking my root domain - Why and Help
I have an odd question concerning SERP rankings on Google along with PageRank and Google Trust. I have a website created in HTML with a WP blog created in a sub-directory. I am finding that the blog is getting relatively good rankings yet it seems the root domain is not getting any of the rank or trust passed onto it as it consistently is outranked by the blog. In fact, for a few of our targeted keywords the root domain does not even show up at all, yet the blog does. Our blog is #2 in Google SERPs, a top Google Place ranking, a Youtube video in the top 10 and a Google Ad place somewhere in the mix of first page ads. The root domain is nowhere to be found. Is there something I need to correct either on the site, in Google Webmaster or in WP Settings that I am not aware that is pushing all the Google Rank and Trust to the blog instead of the other way around? I considered changing the WP Site URL to the root domain thinking it will pass more SEO mojo to the root. But I don't think this is the way to go. I am kind of at a loss, any help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SEO-Novice0 -
SEO Issues with Avactis Shopping Cart Please Help(Resolved)
I am seeking advise or help with several issues I am having with Avactis. First is Title Duplicates or adds the same on every CMS page Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products so for instance it say Contact Us-Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products or Whats the Difference Seal It or Xtreme -Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products every cms page it adds Seal It Green Sealants - Non-Toxic Organic Sealant Products to the title description. which in turn makes my Title Descriptions TOO LONG! Second is the very lengthy urls. I came into this project after the site was developed and there are more issues than I ever imagined. Duplicated Pages, Titles etc all over the place. Trying to work on one issue at a time. ( I think re-building the site using something else would of been a quicker solution) But Client didn't want to do that. Any advise or tips to get through this process with this platform would be extremely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MACameron0 -
Wordpress site, combine Blog without hurting SEO - Need Expert Advice
Hi, I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it. I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer. The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/ Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog. So you have the following: www.nextgenrestoration.com (main site) then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog) www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog Original person that built the site quit. New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress. Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match. Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
Technical SEO | | Force7
the site to Wordpress quit. So I got involved because the new person they hired could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site. Here was my Thoughts. The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update. My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating) If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site. My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there. The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site. Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog? I want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic. As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help. Thanks in advance for your time! Force70 -
Duplicate index.php/webpage pages on website. Help needed!
Hi Guys, Having a really frustrating problem with our website. It is a Joomla 1.7 site and we have some duplicate page issues. What is happening is that we have a webpage, lets say domain.com/webpage1 and then we also have domain.com/index.php/webpage1. Google is seeing these as duplicate pages and is causing me some real SEO problems. I have tried setting up a 301 redirect but it wn't let me redirect /index.php/webpage1 to /webpage1. Anyone have any ideas or plugins that can be used to sort this out? Any help will be really appreciated! Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewBarby0 -
Buying new domains to help with SEO
Hi, Does buying new keyword related domains and 301 redirect them to my site have any seo benefit?
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Understanding the actions needed from a Crawl Report
I've just joined SEOMOZ last week and have not even received my first full-crawl yet, but as you know, I do get the re-crawl report. It shows I have 50 301's and 20 rel canonical's. I'm still very confused as to what I'm supposed to fix...And, all the rel canonical's are my sites main pages, so hence I am still equally confused as to what the canonical is doing and how do I properly setup my site. I'm a technical person and can grasp most things fairly quickly, but on this the light bulb is taking a little while longer to fire-up 🙂 If my question wasn't total jibberish and you can help shed some light, I would be forever grateful. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | apmgsmith0