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
-
What Happens If I migrate my Sandbox free website to a new domain? Will my rankings be affected?
Hey Mozzers! One of my sites recently got out of the Google sandbox period (cause it started to rank for keywords) but the problem is the old domain sounds kinda uncool. I then found a new domain with a very cool name so I want to migrate my old site to the new domain. So my question is will it affect my rankings on Google? Or will my new domain be sandboxed for another year? Please help me out fast.
Technical SEO | | zachis323431 -
2 pages ranking for same keyword.. Need some advice on what to do.
Here's my question. When I first started my website we started Using keyword anchor building links To my homepage . Over the years Our business has expanded to more than just baby headbands. I now have a baby headband page. When tracking my rankings. I sometimes see Both pages in Google for the same keyword. Other days I do not see both of them. My question is Should I continue building links and keyword anchor text for the home page Or should I switch them and start building keyword-rich anchor text for my baby headband page. I'm just wondering if the Search engine is confused by the two. When searching for the keyword baby headbands. I will sometimes show up for eight and nine. 8 is my home page and 9 is for the baby headband page. I have always shown up for the keyword "baby Headbands" for my home page.
Technical SEO | | PB20070 -
Help with Getting Googlebot to See Google Charts
We received a message from Google saying we have an extremely high number of URLs that are linking to pages with similar or duplicate content. The main difference between these pages are the Google charts we use. It looks like Google isn't able to see these charts (most of the text are very similar) and the charts (lots of it) are the main differences between these pages. So my question is what is the best approach to allowing Google to see the data that exists in these charts? I read from here http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/69818/how-can-i-get-google-to-index-content-that-is-written-into-the-page-with-javascr that a solution would be to have the text that is displayed on the charts coded into the html and hidden by CSS. I'm not sure but it seems like a bad idea to have it seen by Google but hidden to the user by CSS. It just sounds like a cloaking hack. Can someone clarify if this is even a solution or is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | ERICompensationAnalytics1 -
Need help please with url guidelines.
Hi SEO PROS, I have a website and I am planing to change all the urls. I need to know what is the right way of making the urls. Here is some information. We are based in Brooklyn NY and we sell our services to Manhattan clients and Manhattan has few names. NY, NYC, Manhattan and NY. So by looking at my service area I came up with this url. http://www.signsny.com/brooklyn-ny/awnings this is my current url. http://www.signsny.com/sign-types/awnings-canopies-brooklyn-NYC. This is what I am planning to change it to. Please guide me to the right direction, so in future I don't have to re-do them again. Thanks Abie
Technical SEO | | signsny0 -
What steps can you take to help a site that does not change
Hi, i am working on a product and services website www.clairehegarty.co.uk but the problem i have is, the site does not really change. The home page stays the same and the only time it changes is when a new course is advertised. The most important page on the website is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy but we have seen the site drop in rankings because the page is not being updated. This page has all the information you could want on weight loss but we have seen the page drop from number one in google to number four. I would like to know what steps we should take to increase our rankings in google and would be grateful for your suggestions. If i put in articles on the site, had a section where we put a new article every week, would this then get google to visit the whole site more and move our pages back up the rankings, or should we be looking at doing other things.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Htaccess help... I moved my blog from a seperate domain to newdomain.com/blog
Hi, I need help with my htaccess file, I've been told. I moved a blog i had hosted somewhere else to a directory on my ecommerce site. I was told i would need to write something to go in the htaccess file so the sites would not become duplicate content, but I'm a novice and have no idea how to write that code. blog moved from www.whosyourmoondoggie.com to www.moondoggieinc.com/blog Please help, or direct me to the right tutorial 🙂 Thanks! KristyO
Technical SEO | | KristyO0 -
Help - just disappeared from Google
My google listings have disappeared in the last few days. I used to have positions 1, 2, 3, and sometimes 4 on page 1, but since the last update (19th?) it appears I have been dropped? My domainn is www.eseyo.com and the search terms I used to acheive results for were "seo in brentwood" and "seo brentwood" I even created a screencast of my success some time ago for a blog post: http://www.eseyo.com/seo-in-brentwood/ Is there anything that I can do to get these listings back? I have not done anything too naughty in terms of tactics. Purchased a few fiver gigs to get some fake social likes but that is it the rest was all true links and listings. your help and advice most appreciated. Scott.
Technical SEO | | eseyo0 -
Google Places - need to update
I've got a client who verified their Google Places listing years ago, and noone knows who so I can't access it. The business is now moving and I need to update the address. What should I do? thanks
Technical SEO | | garymeld0