New Website Old Domain - Still Poor Rankings after 1 Year - Tagging & Content the culprit?

[Shineband]

I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com   Rankings remained pretty much non-existent.

I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent.

Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems  (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com  both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue.

I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/  as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty?

As SEO companies far and wide daily try to  persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great.

No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!

[Shineband]

THANK YOU so much for your detailed response and effort! You bring up some important points for me to address. Though I can probably take the time to learn and fix a couple of the issues you pointed out, it's admittedly a very overwhelming situation to have gotten burned twice in the past two years by SEO & marketing companies. Being a wedding bandleader is actually a very time consuming job requiring many hats. I joined MOZ Pro a few months ago and have difficulty even reading through or viewing the intro videos in that the lingo, followup on basic tasks, etc. -there's so much to take in and even set up. I realize my weekly reports don't mean alot if I can't put the time in. For me to take a shot at one of the items you suggested for example: increasing my loading time, which is crucial as you mentioned - sounds like it could get pretty drawn out, and potentially done incorrectly (by me). As SEO practices change frequently, my lack of tech experience is contributing to a downturn of business after several decades, not for lack of effort!

Is there a possibility we could chat by phone, or could you recommend some I could contact? I would like to make a priority list and see if I could hire you, or a referral,  to fix some of the issues you had pointed out, without creating a muddled situation. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity.

Respectfully,

John Harris    John@shineband.com     jharris28@comcast.net   781 545 6011

[AlanBleiweiss]

SEO has become much more complex over the years, especially given how aggressive Google has gotten.

Unfortunately, it MAY be at least PARTLY the case where the bad links were weakening the overall trust of the site in a way that until the next Penguin update, you may not see value from that clean-up work. And even then, if other on-site issues, or not enough off-site truly high quality and highly relevant link and citation trust exist on a large enough scale, you may still be stuck in the weeds.

I poked around and here's my very initial take:

1. Critical Page processing inefficiency issues.  Even though my one-time quick check speed test showed your home page rapidly loaded, Google's Page Speed Insights tool came back with your home page scoring a dismal 43 out of 100 points for desktop users, and 53 out of 100 points for mobile users.  One-time actual time-based speed data is not enough to trust speed considerations. So scores below 85 in GPSI are a big red flag that you may very well have intermittent speed problems.  And speed problems are a proven Panda contributing factor.

So I ran a SECOND speed test with a different tool and in THAT test, your home page took 29 seconds to process in a DSL emulator.  Any time a page takes 20 or more seconds, that is an absolute, confirmed by Matt Cutts, ranking killer.

The fact that you have over 5 megabytes of content/resources and file sizes combined just for the home page is only one of potentially several factors why that is a very bad problem.

2. You don't have a traditional "services" silo(funnel) on your main navigation. You offer services, and yet that information is buried on pages that are not dedicated to any specific service type, such as "Boston Wedding Band" or "Boston cover band". So even though your page Titles on main nav pages use those words, the pages themselves are not refined enough in focus for those phrases - they're more broad in the content focus.

3. Your blog posts are fully included in the main blog index page view, so that causes duplication of content between that page and the actual individual post pages.

4. You have the business address in your page footers, but that info is not wrapped in Schema.org markup for local business info. Schema is now critical as one part of overall SEO (this was confirmed just this week by Duane Forrester from Bing during Pubcon - he said "you need to use Schema, you do NOT want us having to figure it out".

5. Have you checked your local listings consistency?  Moz Local is very good at that. It's yet one more piece of the puzzle.

6. Regarding the old content - generally speaking, yes, very old, thin or low value content is also another consideration from a Panda perspective.  Does it make sense to just kill those entirely? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there's a way to salvage those - through consolidation and 301 redirects, perhaps.  It's not a simple, absolute process to just kill them off without understanding the complete picture.

SO...

I've only scratched the surface here, so while your specific initial question may be a factor, you have many other critical flaws in the site specific to the main pages of the site itself, and those are the most important pages.

As painful as it is to have been burned/disappointed by past SEO "professional" services, and where you may be able to muddle through getting back on track, I'm very happy to see you are reaching out here at Moz. It's a great community and several people are very willing to help where we can, when we can right here.