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).
-
Hello Mathew,
I did a site:domain.com search and do still see some of the old URLs indexed so I checked the URLs using an HTTP header status code checker and they are returning the correct 301 response. I also checked the the rel canonical tag on the new URLs and they do reference themselves, not the old URLs. Therefore I see no reason to be concerned about this issue. It takes time for Google to revisit those old URLs, see the redirect, and update their index. In time the old URLs will drop off and any links going into them should begin counting toward the pagerank of your new URLs.
HOW.Ever...
You have dozens of geotargeted doorway pages that Google probably doesn't like, or that at least violate their guidelines. If there was an office in each location it would be the right thing to do, as you would include the geo-specific address and phone number. Since every page has the same phone number and presumably there is only one office, you are running into the same problem many other "local" businesses have had to deal with over the years. Unfortunately, there still isn't any real solution and you will have real trouble ranking in the local/maps area on Google.
What to do about this is beyond the scope of this question, but if you're going to work with another SEO on this I'd recommend one who has experience with service-oriented business with multiple locations. This page would be a good place to start, and I have pre-filtered it to show only "local search" experts.
Good luck!
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
-
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/ Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type **theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ ** The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours. I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well. How do you feel about that?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Need advice for new site's structure
Hi everyone, I need to update the structure of my site www.chedonna.it Basicly I've two main problems: 1. I've 61.000 index tag (more with no post)2. The category of my site are noindex I thought to fix my problem making the category index and the tag noindex, but I'm not sure if this is the best solution because I've a great number of tag idexed by Google for a long time. Mybe it is correct just to make the category index and linking it from the post and leave the tag index. Could you please let me know what's your opinion? Regards.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
What would be the optimum URL structure for an inbound tour operator that sells tours in Jordan?
We are an inbound tour operator in Jordan. We have just redesigned and restructured our website. We sell tours in Jordan (Jordan Tours) and this is the primary keyword we are targeting. Our Jordan Tours page includes different tour categories. Each category takes you to a number of tours to choose from. What would be the best URL structure that will optimize our ranking for "Jordan Tours"? A. /jordantours/tour-type-category/tour-name B. /jordantours/tour-name C. /tour-name I have to admit that two weeks ago we launched the new site and went with option C. by intuition, aiming at reducing the clutter for a better user experience. So if C isn't the answer, is it worth making the change and applying 301 redirects after our new pages has been indexed for 2 weeks? Your insight is much appreciated. Thank you, Rakan
Technical SEO | | rakan0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Multilingual blogs and site structure
Hi everyone, I have a question about multilingual blogs and site structure. Right now, we have the typical subfolder localization structure. ex: domain.com/page (english site) domain.com/ja/page (japanese site) However, the blog is a slightly more complicated. We'd like to have english posts available in other languages (as many of our users are bilinguals). The current structure suggests we use a typical domain.com/blog or domain.com/ja/blog format, but we have issues if a Japanese (logged in) user wants to view an English page. domain.com/blog/article would redirect them to domain.com/ja/blog/article thus 404-ing the user if the post doesn't exist in the alternate language. One suggestion (that I have seen on sites such as etsy/spotify is to add a /en/ to the blog area: ex domain.com/en/blog domain.com/ja/blog Would this be the correct way to avoid this issue? I know we could technically work around the 404 issue, but I don't want to create duplicate posts in /ja/ that are in English or visa versa. Would it affect the rest of the site if we use a /en/ subfolder just for the blog? Another option is to use: domain.com/blog/en domain.com/blog/ja but I'm not sure if this alternative is better. Any help would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Seiyav0 -
Moving a blog from unique domain to root /blog/ but on 2 different servers? HELP!
I have a main site hosted on one server, I have the blog hosted on another server - BOTH of which my team has FULL control over. I ultimately want the blog to reside on the root domain: www.mysite.com/blog/ My network team is saying "DNS will not allow this to happen, the resolution will ultimately have to be on blog.website.com" Has anyone out there done this? Is it even possible? HELP!
Technical SEO | | BCA0