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
-
Large Domain Authority Drop - Please Help
Hey there all, We are having the toughest time trying to figure out why our domain authority went from 12 to 3 with a search visibility score of literally zero. Back in Feb when the D.A.'s were all updated, we went down while all our competitors went up. We've been stuck at 3 for a few months and we can't understand why and aren't sure if we are dealing with a penalty of sorts. www.skycraftstudios.com is our site. We have a total of 60 some odd links in Search Console (some are garbage that we have disavowed, others are quality) but none of them are getting picked up in the newer MoZ index. We have added a few quality links lately, and even sped up our site quite a bit in conjunction with standard best practice optimizations, and even added an SSL cert, yet we stuck at a terrible D.A. of 3 and aren't even able to get into the top 10 pages of our main targeted term which seems incredibly odd to us. The site has been up for almost 2 years. Could this be simply a matter of not enough quality inbound links from the index? Any insight here would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SkycraftNate1 -
URL Structure - Is this correct? Programming Advice Needed
Hello My father is having a website built called www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk. The site consists of different product categories as set out below 1.Engineered Wood, 2. Parquet & Reclaimed and 3. Prefinished Wood filtering further into colours 1. /lights-greys/, 2. /beiges/, 3, /browns/ and 4. /darks-blacks and then the brand name for example Vicenza. Example of a clean url **http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys/vicenza/ ** Each and every url is unique Our programmer has put in place 301 redirects - http://www.thewoodgalleries.co.uk/engineered-wood/lights-greys-engineered-wood/vicenza/ - Is this really needed? It does not look clean and will appear like this is Google. This is a completely new site, a new start up business. I'm very confused as to why he has done this and concerned this method of programming does now follow "best practice". Can any programmer offer any advice? To get a better idea how the url structure is set out, I have attached a jpg image. Thank you Faye W09qswW.jpg
Technical SEO | | Faye2341 -
Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay
Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).
Technical SEO | | mattylac0 -
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 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
My pages says it has 16 errors, need help
My pages says it has 16 errors, and all of them are due to duplicate content. How do I fix this? I believe its only due to my meta tag description.
Technical SEO | | gaji0 -
Looking to hire someone to help on my website. On page issues with subpages outranking homepage
Hello, I have a site that has been doing good for quite a while now. But lately I'm running into issues with on page seo. I have ranked well for long periods of time, but changes like adding content or moving stuff around has bumped me out of the rankings. I would prefer not to publicly disclose the site. My main keyword I rank for is "word1 word2". I notice if I do a site: search for "word1 word2" homepage is #1, site search for just word1 it's #1 as well, but the word2 returns a category listing above the homepage. I noticed this happen right as I fell back from the rankings. I am looking to hire an SEO profession to help me out with on page issues. I've come to admit that I just don't understand something about this and I need help from someone who has a lot of experience with this. I was hoping to find recommendations by people here for a company I could hire for this. I would want to pay no more than $1,000. I hope that budget is high enough to get a skilled individual/company working with me. I'm not sure where to search for online to get a skilled on page seo professional, so I thought a personal recommendation from someone here would possibly be able to help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0 -
Please help....
Hi Guys! Ok a bit of a funny one here which is causing a confusion between us and a web designer and I was wondering if anyone on here might be able to help. Just a bit of back ground for you, the website has been built on Concrete 5 and when we tried to building a sitemap we found over 110,000 pages. When we spoke to the web designer they have told us that within Google webmaster tools, Google has only indexed 58. But.... (and this is where things get a little confusing, so bare with me.) I thought that cant be right so into the Google search bar I put in site:www.sitename.co.uk and had 217 results appear. So google cant have just 58 pages indexed, right? So after speaking to the designer he then posted on the Concrete 5 help forum, to try and help figure it out. I have posted his exact forum post below that the web designer has asked: I'm having some issues where a site we are working on seems to be making multiple pages going to the same page. An SEO specialist has run a report and found a number of duplicate pages created by C5. We are concerned that this is going to dilute or worse penalise the way google sees the site. http://www.sitename.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID...
[http://www.sitename.co.uk/index.php?cID=?akID[155]atSelectOptionID... Is there a way of stopping google from accessing these duplicate 'cID' pages and stop them being made? Also is there a way of getting rid of the ones that are there? We've done a number of sites in C5 and are beginning to get concerned about this... So I guess my question is: If I can access the same content via 4-5 different cID's is that classed as duplicate content? Thanks in advance guys, and any help would greatly appreciated. 🙂0