Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?

[stagl]

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.

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[RonMedlin]

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.

[stagl]

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.

Y1ScM.png

[stagl]

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.

[Ben-HPB]

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quick search with a free tool called Xenu and I just and the tool and it finding a ton of broken links, pages that are no longer active.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.

[Ben-HPB]

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

[stagl]

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

Tncwc.png

[stagl]

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?

[HiveDigitalInc]

Links links links. You have no links. Majestic SEO says your best link is this...

http://bangkok2night.com/links/ (slightly NSFW)

[PracticeFusion]

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.

[RonMedlin]

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.

[stagl]

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.

[stagl]

no, we haven't changed our site location.

[stagl]

Duh, sorry guys:   dental departures

[RonMedlin]

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.

[polarking]

Did you recently change your sites location?

[PracticeFusion]

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.