Google favoring old site over new site...

[mrodriguez1440]

Hi,

I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com.  His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links.

Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed).  It's been about 2 weeks now and no change.

Has anyone experienced something like this?  If so, what did you do (if anything).  Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links.

Thanks.

[MattAntonino]

Go for it!

[mrodriguez1440]

Would you mind if I PM you?

[MattAntonino]

Also, the new page's meta titles & descriptions are fairly spammy.  Those meta descriptions ALL start with the main keyphrase. It's also in almost every title.

Many pages have two meta descriptions as well - not great for SEO.

So there are also a few technical things to clean up but I would focus on the 301 for the moment.

[mrodriguez1440]

Awesome - thanks Matt!

[MattAntonino]

I see 260ish links for the old site in Ahrefs and 12 for the new. The old site had plenty of decent backlinks (lauflaw, askthepalawyer, goinglegal, etc.) and a few that definitely needed to go (londover, the India spam, poeticdictionary etc.)

The links on the new one are good - but there aren't many.

I would highly recommend a disavow on the old domain and then a page by page 301 to the most relevant page. By passing some of that good juice on the old site you can quickly jumpstart the rankings for the new one but starting by cleaning up his profile and doing things right going forward.

260 links isn't much to go through for a disavow. You can quickly get a win here with this plan.