SEO and former site
-
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google.
He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com.
Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time?
Thank you for your help.
-
Looking at OSE, I disagree there there are no spammy links. Did you see all of those EDU comment links?
-
Unfortunately not really. Google will notice it's gone and will dig into the new link structure. You could include an xml sitemap to help the crawlers understand your site, but it's going to take time to gain value in those new URLs. You may consider (if it's not too late), 301 redirecting the old pages to the new pages and pass some of the old SEO value to the new site. Those new URLs have no SEO value until people start clicking, linking, etc. Good luck and optimize as hard as you can. Of course, this is my option and if you get other feedback from elsewhere, I'd love to hear about it.
-
The internal link structure is the issue. It's completely different. Any thoughts on how to remove the old link structure from Google, if that's even possible?
-
When you shut the old website down and moved to a new server, did the URLs change at all? Did the internal link structure change at all? If so, that's probably the number one problem. I noticed the domain authority is only a 15/100 and there aren't many external links to the site. That could have something to do with it. If you're targeting the keyword "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", you may want to include that keyword more often. I noticed it four times on the homepage but that keyword is battling against all the other content. Try incorporating that keyword about four times every 250 words or so. Without doing a site audit, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing it to rank low. Just my opinion. Hope it helps.
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
-
Does subdomain hurt SEO on main site
This client sells event management software and puts all their clients on different subdomains of their main domain. Looking in SEO tools like OSE, when I run a backlink analysis, it pulls up all the backlinks to the subdomains as well as those for the main domain. In webmaster tools when I look at queries, impressions and clicks, they get at least 30 times more traffic and impressions on keywords found in their subdomains and very few on their own. In other words, all these tools are providing a collective analysis of main domain and all subdomains. All the backlinks and keywords recorded for those subdomains are not at all relevent to the keywords they want to rank for. For example, their software supports Boy Scouts, so keywords they rank for according to WT include merit badge, scout camp, etc., but of course, that's on the subdomain. As a result, if you were to take a snapshot of their online presence as these tools do, you would think they were a boy scout website and not a software developer if you include the subdomain, along with its PR, backlinks, keywords, etc. So the question I have is, does Google connect all these subdomains with the main domain and then water down the main site with irrelevant keywords, content and backlinks? Or does Google see all those subdomains as completely separate and we don't need to worry or move their clients off their subdomain? I'm worried about Google assigning a "boy scout" relevancy to them. Am I wrong? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Is it Wortwhile to have a HTML site map for a Large Site
We are a large, enterprise site with many pages (some on our CMS and some old pages that exist outside our CMS). Every month we submit various an XML site map. Some pages on our site can no longer be found via following links from one page to another (orphan pages). Some of those pages are important and some not. Is it worth our while to create a HTML site map? Does any one have any recent stats or blog posts to share, showing how a HTML site map may have benefited a large site. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Need onpage site audit and seo
i have a pretty old ecommerce website for home decor products. It has been experiencing some rank loss in the past year. No manual penalty but algo rank losses. I need someone to fix seo related issues on my site. It runs on magento with multistore configuration. please reply if you can offer any help nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | orion680 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Site revamp for neglected site - modifying site structure, URLs and content - is there an optimal approach?
A site I'm involved with, www.organicguide.com, was at one stage (long ago) performing reasonably well in the search engines. It was ranking highly for several keywords. The site has been neglected for some considerable period of time. A new group of people are interested in revamping the site, updating content, removing some of the existing content, and generally refreshing the site entirely. In order to go forward with the site, significant changes need to be made. This will likely involve moving the entire site across to wordpress. The directory software (edirectory.com) currently being used has not been designed with SEO in mind and as a result numerous similar pages of directory listings (all with similar titles and descriptions) are in google's results, albeit with very weak PA. After reading many of the articles/blog posts here I realize that a significant revamp and some serious SEO work is needed. So, I've joined this community to learn from those more experienced. Apart from doing 301 redirects for pages that we need to retain, is there any optimal way of removing/repairing the current URL structure as the site gets updated? Also, is it better to make changes all at once or is an iterative approach preferred? Many thanks in advance for any responses/advice offered. Cheers MacRobbo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macrobbo0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0