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Moz says I have too many links on the homepage - could this be hurting my SEO?

I have a lot of links on my homepage - especially from the services menu. I also have a few in the intro paragraph that are unnecessary but are linked to other pages using keywords - such as "veterinarians" which go to Meet our Veterinarians, etc. I'm afraid to make changes as I don't want to go overboard and actually hurt our rankings further. Any thoughts on this?

Brant

We use a service which sponsors listings on various popular directories. In turn, it changes our phone number so that I can qualify if the call is a lead or not and then charge us. Unfortunately, while this service helps exposure on those directories, the phone number as well as the website are different.

How much of a problem is this for our local SEO?

Other directories include Suerpages and Citysearch.

-Brant

Thanks Paul!

Why do you think there was more than just a shared IP?

Brant

Hi Paul,

Thanks for responding to my thread. Yes, I did start transferring my website to a new host yesterday. I decided to go with SiteGround who have really awesome so far.

Brant

Some of you might have seen that I recently discovered that another was mirroring my website(petmedicalcenter.com). Found out that this domain (justinchina.co.uk) was previously hosted on Host Monster and when we upgraded to a dedicated IP this last year we got that same IP address. Unfortunately, the justinchina.co.uk domain from GoDaddy is still pointing to our server/IP. Thus the mirrored site.

This has been a huge headache and a loss in rankings has made this even more frustrating. Instead of giving me a new IP address, Host Monster said to just add this to my htaccesss file:

RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} justinchina.co.uk
   RewriteRule .* - [F]

I waited 24 hours, submitted two support tickets, and talked to 4 tech support people and this is the solution I receive when they should have given me a new IP. I think it is time to switch. Any good host recommendations?

Thank you for tweeting them! That was so nice of you

It seems that justinchina.co.uk was previously hosted on host monster which is our host. This year we signed up for the pro package that got us a dedicated IP address. The same IP address that justinchina had. Their domain on godaddy was still pointing to that IP address which is now ours. So now host monster is currently trying to fix it. Anyway just thought I would update you both.

I am glad that the website wasn't hacked and am hopeful that this was the cause for the loss in rankings. Thanks again for your help!

Hi Miriam!

Your list is awesome and am starting to comb through it now. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question!

Brant

So I have spoken to both Host Monster and GoDaddy. Host Monster says that the justinchina.co.uk domain has their A Record pointing to Host Monster (our website) - is that the same as domain forwarding and masking?

The most frustrating part is that Host Monster says it is GoDaddy that needs to fix it and GoDaddy says they can't do anything about it and the host is responsible.

So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host.

So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings?

Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose.

Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me.

Brant

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! I would have had no idea where to start if it wasn't for your response!

Going off of what you said, I checked the HTACCESS in the root directory and it doesn't appear to be anything in there that is redirecting to the justinchina website. Secondly, the domain is through GoDaddy, hosting through Host Monster, and email through Yahoo Business. So at this point it just seems like a need in a haystack.

Would it be best to just do a clean install of everything on the website? This is very overwhelming!

Thank you Erica!

-Brant

Hi Miriam!

Your list is awesome and am starting to comb through it now. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question!

Brant

Thank you for tweeting them! That was so nice of you

It seems that justinchina.co.uk was previously hosted on host monster which is our host. This year we signed up for the pro package that got us a dedicated IP address. The same IP address that justinchina had. Their domain on godaddy was still pointing to that IP address which is now ours. So now host monster is currently trying to fix it. Anyway just thought I would update you both.

I am glad that the website wasn't hacked and am hopeful that this was the cause for the loss in rankings. Thanks again for your help!