Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?
-
I've seen our SEO drop to more or less the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have any answers yet as to why.
SEOMoz is running it's crawl currently, and I have a few errors about duplicate titles and content, so I know I have some work cut out for me. But, why the sudden drop?
The only change I made at the time was a change to our URL structure, but all links were 301'd to their new location. Does this still hurt SEO that terribly?
Also, our robots.txt file is getting indexed and showing up as the first result at times. Very embarrassing. It's doing better than our other pages.
I don't get what's happening here.
-
Were you logged into Google when you did this search, when you saw your sites? If so Google was showing you results based on personal search. Sites that you've clicked on recently will show up on the first page.
-
We used to be in the first page results for "thantakit international dental center", but now nowhere. I've attached a screen cap of our issue with the robots.txt file showing up for the results as well.
-
Mr. Rock,
First, thanks so much for helping me out. This is my first question to seomoz and I'm an SEO newbie. So far I'm amazed at how much people are willing to help and how quickly I'm getting answers.
I'm thinking of dumping our site map and just making our site more crawl-able in general. 5800 URLs does sound a bit steep... I will look into Xenu.
As for the URLs, the url structure is like this:
/dentists/[country]/[city]/[clinic name]
so what you presented is rather normal, it just so happens that the clinic name is so generic, so it looks kind of funny. Do you think there would be a better way to present the clinic landing page? I chose this so that there was a standard hierarchy for drilling down into the clinic landing pages.
Again, that's a ton. It is my #1 priority to tune the site for SEO right now and it looks like SEOmoz and its community t'll be a key tool in doing so.
-
I think I found a few things that you can focus on first.. Do a quick search with a free tool called Xenu and I just and the tool and it finding a ton of broken links, pages that are no longer active. You will wan't to go through and clean those up first. Since it gives a bad visitor experience when the find something that maybe helpful and they click the link and it is dead... You can keep visitors on your site just by making this change.
The crazy thing is Xenu crawled 5886 URL's ???? Do you have that many pages? IF not you maybe having some database issues.
Another thing that may have you in the dump is from the Panda updates with low content to page ratio with this like below, as it looks like from the sitemap I ran you have a ton of these..
http://www.dentaldepartures.com/dentists/mexico/cabo+san+lucas
that then goes to this page for more details:
http://www.dentaldepartures.com/dentists/mexico/cabo+san+lucas/cabo+san+lucas+dental
I hope this helps, just food for thought.
-
Just got finished reading the dialog, you mentioned landing pages that use to rank and they do not now.. Can you direct us to one of those landing pages that had in the past gernerated leads?
THx
-
no prob, phil. I know I have a tendency to be a bit vague.
I have analytics set up and have attached a image of our impression drop over the past few months. We pretty much don't exist on the web these days.
We used to be #1 for many of the clinic landing pages. A search for "Sani Dental Group" would place us #1, now it is on page 15 or something.
Maybe we pissed off google? We're working on updating our content and we need a marketing guy pretty badly so we can get our name out there, but I was hoping there were some things a lowly developer like myself could do in the in meantime.
Edit: added image
-
when you say "we have no links" are you saying throughout the site? or other sites pointing to us? (or both)
I can fix the internal links no problem. I'm already working on a solution for that currently. As for links to our site, that is always the toughest part, right?
-
Links links links. You have no links. Majestic SEO says your best link is this...
http://bangkok2night.com/links/ (slightly NSFW)
-
I know it seems like I'm just answering your questions with even more questions, but I promise I'll eventually be helpful :).
Do you have Google Analytics set up on your site? If so, I'd suggest digging in to find out exactly where you're losing this traffic. Did a specific keyword drop off? A certain type of keyword? A certain landing page? A certain section of your site? etc.
-
Well yeah you've got to build some high quality relevant links. Your site is not just going to rank from on page optimization unless it is a very uncompetitive niche. Which Dentists is probably going to take some linkbuilding.
-
the change happened last month as seen in the image. I haven't been doing any link building yet, so I guess that's on my list of things to do.
-
no, we haven't changed our site location.
-
Duh, sorry guys: dental departures
-
My guess is that you got hit by the penguin update. What kind of linkbuilding have you been doing? Also it would be nice to see the site and no what keywords you were targeting.
-
Did you recently change your sites location?
-
If you're willing to share the URL of your site then some of us here might be able to help. It's hard to analyze and offer suggestions without seeing the site since there are so many different things that it could be.
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
-
Question on structuring URLs in a Drupal CMS - Adverse SEO or Analytics impacts?
Hello Moz Community, We're building out a health system (think a bunch of hospitals and clinics etc.) website on Drupal for the first time. Nebraskamed.com is our domain. Because we're using nodes instead of pages, our URL structure can pretty much be whatever we think makes sense. Our proposal is to drop /blog/ and related terms from the URL structure, because it doesn't really mean anything to the user. Instead, we'd use the service line "cancer" for example, followed by the name of the blog post or document. Example: nebraskamed.com/cancer/10-bone-cancer-myths Do you see any red flags (perhaps with SEO or Analytics for example) to what I'm proposing? domain name/service line/blog-post-name If so, do you have a URL structure you advise?
Reporting & Analytics | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine1 -
What are all the 5's in SEO Queries in Analytics?
Every small business client has the same thing. 5 impressions for keywords, row after row, every single month. Why exactly 5 and why month after month the same thing? I see this in every local business I work in - and for very important phrases! It's gotten to the point that I think those are fake and I just look at the impressions that have numbers great than 5. Obviously I have to get their impressions up, but what am I to believe about these?
Reporting & Analytics | | katandmouse0 -
Can i know trough Google analytics the most busy time in the day ?
Hello guys,
Reporting & Analytics | | WayneRooney
I have a website with around 600-650 visitor a day.
Can i know trough Google analytics the most busy time in the day ? Thank you0 -
If I install google Analytics, that can affect my SEO.?
I purchased a site that has a lot of Backlinks and when I started to make changes like installing google analytics! i suspect the performance in search engine was getting worst because of that, so I removed.
Reporting & Analytics | | pparma
Now I'm trying MOZ and needs GA, should I install it again??
Maybe it analyces the backlinks and tells google, I don't know, is that possible?0 -
So many questions!
Yesterday was a jubilant day! Our website http://www.farnorthkennel.com hit the #2 spot on google for one of our keyword searches "german shepherd puppies in Alaska." We are new at this and it took a lot of work and about 2 months to do this (I realize this is fast). What happened overnight? We have new pages on page 1 towards the bottom, but our homepage fell to around page 4? What would make this happen? I didn't make any updates to the homepage recently. Am I linking to it too much interally? Am I running too many categories? The "too many on pages links" warning comes up all of the time, but I feel like my site is structured user friendly. I am blogging like mad and successfully getting guest blog posts on reputable sites like mad. I have 30,000 Facebook fans.... but will never understand google. Any takers? What happened overnight?
Reporting & Analytics | | Joshlaska0 -
Can you filter referring keywords in Google Analytics by language?
Hi All! So yes, I know that you can see/filter the language that the computer or browser was set to (en-us, ru, fr, etc.), but if you look at the keywords used by visitors falling under "fr", some are in English. Is there any way to get, say, just the keywords in Russian - regardless of what the visitor's browser language was set to? Thanks! Aviva
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0 -
How can I see the history reports?
Hi, I want to see the history reports for my ranking. For example I can how my website traffic changed in past few months using Google Analytics but I am not able to monitor the performance of my keywords on seomoz. Is there any way to do it?
Reporting & Analytics | | ashish2110 -
Overall site traffic - 3 quick questions
3 things : 1. Does Google factor in overall site traffic in rankings? So for 2 sites, all other things being pretty much equal, the one with higher traffic will be listed higher? 2. Does this logically imply that sites with lower traffic overall face an uphill struggle to be ranked highly??? 3. As an extension to this, would it be true to say that by increasing site traffic, say with Google Adwords or other online or offiline or whatever advertising, that might help get higher SEO rankings??? Thanks so much for your responses. This forum is great!
Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja0