Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think you need that consultant.

Good info from Andy.

Trying to combine the 'fluff' content of 1000 sites into a primary domain could seal your fate. I would advise heavily against doing this.

Yes.  If you are going to recycle anything be sure that it is not duplicate content from anywhere else.

I would guess you need to look to start a structured takedown of the network, but you must handle this carefully.

Yes, I would be using a hatchet more than a hammer on this job.  But, careful study before starting.

I did what I asked you to do.

1. 2. 3. 4. in my first post and repeated frequently.

If I was in your situation, I would prepare a one- or two-page document that explains how there are hundreds of spam domains in the wild that contain links and garbage that could damage the company reputation and rankings.

The goal of this document would be to justify funds to hire an experienced consultant who can advise you on how to fix this problem and create a plan for developing the company's web assets going forward.

There is nothing wrong with an in-house SEO getting appraisals or consultations from experts or just second opinions from colleagues.  I do this all of the time - at least a few times a month before I make moves or decisions.  It is not a confession that you are a noob or that you need assistance to do your job.   I get consulting to run my sites better.  It pays.

From what you have described, the size of this problem is enormous and probably too complex to get good well-considered advice for free from a forum.  It will probably get more complex after you start digging.

I am not recommending paid advice because I am looking for work.  I don't do paid consultations for anyone and this job is too big to understand in the amount of time spent on a forum question.   You don't want poorly considered advice.  That usually costs a lot more in repairs than good advice costs from the start.

There are plenty of people who post here who are qualified to help you.  I suggest searching the Q&A for problems similar to this, see who replied, who was helpful, who got lots of thumbs up for relevant questions and who has a style that you like.  Don't rush to hire.  Be careful. Do some research.

Good luck.

Those are the 448 URLs from your website that have been filtered.

You should find garbage in them like shown below.

Have you done what I have suggested three times above?   Do that if you want to identify the problem pages.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

Thanks Paddy,  I appreciate that.

I can write answers here as a break from other writing work.  I just type them and toss them up and enjoy doing it.   If I was going to write a post for the moz blog I would have to spend about 20x more time on it and that would make it hard work instead of fun.   I gotta save my "finished product" writing bullets for my own site.   I don't have enough of them.

I don't know.  You should ask someone who knows a lot about canonicalization.

Did you drill down through all of those indexed pages to see if you can identify all of them?

I've suggested it twice.

Apparently infitter24.rssing.com/chan-13023009/all is poaching my content, taking my original content and adding it to there site. I am not quiet sure what to do about that.

You can have an attorney demand that they stop, you can file DMCA complaints. Be careful

**However it does not explain the sudden appearance of the 175 pages on Googles index **

1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

3. Get a spreadsheet that has all of your URLs.  Drill down through the SERPs checking every one of them.   Can you account for your pagination.  You have a lot of it and that type of page is usually rubbish in the index.  Combine, canonicalize, or get rid of them.

1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

3. When you drill down about 44 pages you will find this...

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 440 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

The bad stuff is usually behind that link.  Google doesn't want to show that stuff to people.   It could be thin, it could be duplicate, it could be spammy, they just might not like it.

4. Find out what is in there.

Possible problems that I see....

I see dupe content like this and this.  Either your guys are grabbin' somebodyelse's content or they are grabbin' yours.  Can get you in trouble with Panda. You need original and unique.  Anything that is not original and unique should be deleted, noindexed or rewritten.

A lot of these pages are really skimpy.   Think content can get you into trouble with Panda.   Anything that is skimpy should be deleted, noindexed or beefed up.

I see multiple links to tags on lots of these posts.  That can cause duplicate content problems.

The tag pages are paginated with just a few pages on each.  These can generate extra pages that are low value, suck up your linkjuice or compound duplicate content problems.

You have archive pages, and category pages and more pagination problems.

Pick one product.  Write posts about....

1. How to use it with photos or video.

2. How to do the typical maintenance with photos or video (link to your spare parts sales page) .

3. Better assembly instructions in the language of your customers with photos.   #*@^!

4. A big list of questions that people ask you on the phone before they buy (post a link to this on the sales page, will save you phone calls).  <title>Know before you buy BobGW's Widget</title>

5. A big list of noob questions that people ask you after buying. Will keep noobs from bugging you by phone and email after the sale.

After you got these on your blog, make a package insert that has the top banner of your website across the top of the page so it looks like your website.   Tell them you got great info at the URLs of  #2, #3 and #5 above.   Print on paper of a screamin' color so they don't miss it and use it as a package insert when you sell the item.   Add discount coupons with distant future expiration dates so they don't throw it away or use it as a shitcatcher on the floor of their canary cage.

Optimize all five of the above blog posts for product-related terms and link then to each other and to the sales page, accessory pages, etc.

After you got all of the pages above and a couple others make a category page just for this product.  It will have everything that everybody everywhere wanted to know about BobGW's Widgets and some stuff that they never thought about, post links to it all across your website.   Lots of people will buy from you, even at higher price, because they know you know everything there is about these products.

Warning... this will also draw lots of questions from people who bought their stuff on Amazon and know that Amazon doesn't give a two craps about helping the customer.   You will almost become a profit center for  competitors whose customers come to you after buyin' because the competitors are too lazy to help their customers or don't answer the phone until after a long lunch.

But you will also pull traffic from all of the long tail keywords that amazon and your customers and even the manufacturer never even thought of.  Some people say you will get in trouble for KW cannibalization but if you use wordtracker to target these pages to stuff that people are askin' about my experience is you will not have much trouble with it and get lots of double listings in the SERPs even when lots of people say that ain't possible any more.

Wow.  Thanks for the update.   I'd like to see a WhiteBoard friday about this after its sorted out with graphics  on how DDoS are carried out and how they are deflected.  And, how you know its happening to you.

These guys must be pissants if they are only asking for a few hundred bucks.  Would be funny to see Mr Skinner point at the camera and say... "We didn't pay-off a $200 pissant and we will not pay you."

One final thing.  Be sure you are working on local search.

I don't share my websites in SEO forums.  That produces competitors,

No guarantees.

Your content has to be golden, written about things that people care about.

Your site has to be unpenalized.   If crappy linkbuilding was done you might have to clean it up.

I want to respond to two things that you said.  Just for perspective, I want to tell you what I do which is a different approach....

**I have just stopped using an Indian company who were writing crap content and placing on what looked like sites they had set up. **

I was not paying a lot but I never saw any difference in the 3 months I was employing them.

Most of the articles on my site cost between $500 and $1000 to produce.   Some higher.  Very few lower.

They all are published on my site.  Not on other sites.  Never.  They are, in my opinion, "best on the web" for their topic.  Place that on your own site.  Don't build articles for other people's sites.  They will compete with you.

People who visit your site will not be impressed by crap, nor will they link to it, share it, email it.

Your goal is to present yourself with the same quality work that you put into the bride's portrait.

The content that I produce takes over one year to rank well and start earning traffic.  The articles that I write have a pay-back time of five years.

Raising your standards will raise your horizon.

I think as a wedding photographer there are not that many long tail phrases,

The number of phrases that bring paying traffic for weddings might be small but the number of phrases that you can write informative stuff about to earn links, likes, shares, etc is enormous.  This is the content that will power your site to the top of the SERPs, not just qualify you to appear for the money keywords.  Money keyword traffic usually does not earn links.

Also, I know wedding photographers in the USA and they are busy photographing every day of the week.  On the other days of the week, they are taking portraits of kids for parents, of grandmas for their children, of products for retailers, of real estate for homesellers, of pets for people who love them, of home interiors for designers, of flowers for gardeners, of sports teams for their sponsors....   Tons of content there for earning clients and earning links.

The content that I write is usually about one short-tail keyword that I really don't expect to rank for because it is usually quite difficult.

My optimization is to write a long article that hits many interesting facets about that one short-tail keyword.   I use wordtracker or another form of keyword research to make a big list of the interesting subtopics that people are searchin' for.  Then I write directly to them.

The result is that I have optimized for millions of long-tail keywords that together pull in more traffic than I would have gotten out of the one short-tail keyword, and because I have covered all of the details that everybody everywhere is searching for I occasionally rank #1 for that one short-tail keyword that I thought was too difficult and millions in the long tail.

Stop messing around and try to rank for everything.

Use the title for something better, something more descriptive (wow just think of all that extra space!).

Absolutely.   I don't have space in my title tags for the domain.  They are going to see the domain below the title in most search engine SERPs.

If I had a site like that I would eliminate the individual ad pages and have much longer-tail ad categories.  Then the category pages would each have multiple ads, most recent at the top, and expiring ads at the bottom.

That puts much more substantive content on every page of the site, more potential keyword matches per page, more ranking power per page.

Compare your page

http://www.ddc.musc.edu/public/symptomsDiseases/diseases/pancreas/gallstones.cfm

to this....

http://www.virtuallrc.com/content/health_medical/gallstones.html

There are huge blocks of text.  Hundreds of words that are absolutely verbatim.  Somebody is copying sombody.

If you have content that has huge blocks of text taken verbatim from other sources then you are at risk from Panda or from filtering.

If you click through to the search results in my post above there are hundreds of other pages on the web that have the same content.  Verbatim.

Google doesn't like that.

Lots of information on disavow errors in Moz member, Marie Haynes' article, published today at SearchEngineWatch.com.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2350646/5-Reasons-a-Site-Hit-by-Google-Penguin-Wont-Recover

For a lot of your big articles, either your guys copied the work of other people or other people copied you.

Look here.

Over 1,100 websites have content that is verbatim to yours.

If this was my site I would either....

A) noindex that content

B) delete that content

C) noindex and rewrite, removing the noindex as the new versions are published.

I think that this site might have other problems.  If you really want to fix it I would get someone who really knows penalty recovery to do a deep dive and prepare a "to do" list for you.

Finally... a lot of the deep content is duplicated on hundreds of other websites.  See here.

When Panda attacks you gotta get original content or die.

In my opinion, this site is a candidate for Panda problems.  Much of the content is skimpy and very similar in wording to content that is published on other websites.

When you have lots of pages with one paragraph and can grab a sentence from the page, copy paste it into google between quotes and find it verbatim on a number of other sites that is how you get a Panda problem.

Also, at the bottom of each page there is a "Digestive Health Blog".   All of that content resolves on an IP address.

This is a good thought.

I really don't want customers contacting me.  I want them to read the website.  My biz model is self-service and I have LOTS of content on the website to answer customer questions.   Most of the people who contact me are not going to be customers.  They just purchased used and got a lemon and want to know how to fix it.

But... if you WANT customer content using the title is fantastic.

I think that this is a good idea.

If you want people to contact you by email then the title is a great place to shout that.

If you prefer email over phone then it is even better to put the email address in such an obvious place.

I do not see any SEO reason against it.

I know a guy who is a gem hunter.  He goes out looking for tourmaline, topaz, garnet, etc.  He found a big pocket of tourmaline crystals.  Lots of them were gem material, many of them were specimen grade.  He estimated their value at about 1/2 million.

A couple of his buddies were joking about him rolling in dough and being on Easy Street.  He told them... "Hey, it is going to take me 25 shows, 10000 miles of driving, 25 five-day road trips, 50 days of packing and unpacking, 125 days and nights on the road, about a year's worth of wages for employees to attend the shows with me, all of those meals on the road and hotel costs, another year of waves to have the specimens cleaned, labeled, weighed, identified, assessed and labled to be marketable... all of that on top of leases, excavation equipment and miner's wages to get them out of the ground,   There might be a few bucks left.

Thanks Patrick.  Glad you liked it.

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur."

lol.  Love that quote.

A great way to find professional people to work on your website is in forums like Moz.  In about 15 years, every person who I have hired to work on any of my websites has been a person who impressed me by what they have posted in an SEO forum.

Why SEO forums?   Because you can read a large number of posts and see if you like their style.  You can see if other people give them the thumbs up or the thumbs down and that is a general gauge of if they know what they are talkin' about.

And if they are willing to give great advice for free, just imagine what they will do if you are payin' them.

If I was new to hiring SEOs, I would post a bunch of questions here that are relevant to my website and see who answers and what kind of job that they do.  That will give you some idea about the person and help you get an education.

Lots of members here do great work.

I am not sayin' this because I want to work for you.  I only work on my own sites.  And, I don't give recommendations on who you should hire.  You should decide that for yourself.  Just sharin' what I think is a great way to find someone who is good.

Some of the star posters here in Moz Q&A are going to be a powerful lot better than the noobs workin' for the big companies who will be assigned to your account.  And some of the people who post here can kick the crap out of the work done by those big companies.  Just sayin'.  I've seen their work.

Selling an existing local website is like trying to sell used goods... or fixer-upper houses.

It ain't gonna suit.   When you find a buyer you are going to have to repaint, rebrand, and they ain't gonna like the domain that you picked out.

The guys who do painting here already have a brand.  The name that was used when they were baptized and the name that they have done biz under for the past twenty years. They will not want BugtusslePainters.com.  People who search will see it and react.... WhoTF is that?   Where is TomThePainter ?

That painting contractor is not going to know the value of a website, the plumber is not going to know the value of a website.

Now, if you want to make money selling a ranked website make one in an industry where people know how much they are worth.  Get a site ranking for Texas Hold'em.  You will have people fightin' to get it.

No,  I rarely think about DA/PA.  I just make content and toss it up.  See what happens.

The site above has a DA of 79 and the homepage has a PA of 82.

But, things work the same on another site that I run.  It has a DA of 27 and a homepage PA of 37.  It competes in an easier sleepier niche but articles on that site start deep and climb slowly over time.

I really like this question.  My answer is YES!

When I publish a new article and link it into my site it generally starts off very very deep in the SERPs.  Too deep to pull big traffic for its primary keywords.... but because my articles are usually quite long (500 to 2000 words) with diverse terminology they do pull in some traffic for long tail keywords.

So, they start deep in the SERPs and then, over time,  they    V-E-R-Y  S-L-O-W-L-Y   climb the SERPs.

As an example, a little over a year ago, I published a new article targeting a keyword with a Moz difficulty of about 48%.  That article started deep in the SERPs at about position #150.  It hung there for a few weeks and then month by month it moved up a few places.  About nine months later it was on the first page, and now about a year and a half later it ranks at #2 or #3.

For about three months it received fewer than ten visitors per day from the SERPs.  At the same time it received only about twenty visitors per day from my internal traffic.   Six months later it was receiving about 40 visitors per day from the SERPs and now it is receiving about 80 per day.

I did zero linkbuilding for this article.  Just tossed it up and went to work on other things.  So far it has attracted about six very good links and a lot of spam links.  Not much.  It has about 152 facebook likes, a dozen tweets but a lot of action for the photos on Pinterest.

In my opinion, the article is a good one, it has a number of nice professionally done photos and a few good external references, so people who click into it stay.  I think that google through Chrome and SERP clickthroughs and backbuttons can determine if people respond well to the article and use that data to influence its rankings.

Most of the aritles that I write behave this way.  A lot of them make the first page of google for keywords of similar difficulty, but before I write them I make sure that I am going to produce an article that deserves first page - or I don't write it.  A few have been disappointments.  I have one written at about the same time as the one above that seems to be stuck about three or four pages down in the SERPs, but it is about a subject that has a lot of contamination in the SERPs - such as Java (programming language, coffee, island, and assorted stuff).

So, yes, if you are seeing your content climb then you might be doing something right that you can scale over time.

I had a bunch of republished articles on my website, done mostly at the request of government agencies and universities.   That site got hit in one of the early Panda updates.   So, I deleted a lot of that content and to the rest I added this line above the tag

name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

That tells google not to index the page but to follow the links and allow pagerank to flow through.   My site recovered a few weeks later.

Grab a unique string of about 20 words from the page and search for it between quotes.   Your page content may have been scraped and republished on other websites.

I agree with Samuel.

I also saw a video in which Matt Cutts was saying that they were removing authorship benefits (photo in the SERPs, showing to people in your circles},  for lots of low-quality authors.

So, just slapping authorship onto a page isn't going to be a magic bullet.

he runs a social security disability advocacy firm

In my opinion, the percentage of potential website visitors to the Nascar, hunting and fishing content who are interested in your client's services is really really really really low.    You might not make enough money to pay for the content.

Have you considered disability topics?  I think that they would produce more leads and would be related to his client base.  I would go that route long before nascar and hunting.  If I did that I would run a couple of his ads on every page and a couple adsense ads to appeal to any person who arrives.

Rand had a whiteboard Friday about creating content for people who are really high in the funnel.  You are proposing a strategy that is completely outside of the funnel.   I understand how you would like to help this client but this type of content is quite a risky investment if you ask me.

http://moz.com/blog/targeting-your-audience-earlier-in-the-buying-process-whiteboard-friday

Fifteen years ago almost anyone could toss up a website, slap ads on it and make a little money.  Lots of people discovered that and started cranking out websites.  Some people grew their business into large companies and did that work at scale.  Companies who were already large heard about that and sent large teams of employees into the fight.

As this happened the competition became smarter, more fierce and more powerful.  It is exactly like traditional warfare where people first started attacking with sticks and stones, then armies with arrows and swords wiped them out, then armies with muskets and cannons wiped them out, then airplanes, bombers, rockets and look where we are today.

The skills, resources and smarts needed to succeed in website competition today are far greater than what was needed 15 years ago, 10 years ago or even just 5 years ago.

i mean will seo live forever ?

As long as search engines are used to discover websites, SEO will probably be important.

Will i loose my seo job ?

Maybe you will.  Maybe you will not.  If your company has been changing their methods as competitors evolve and search engines become more picky then your company might survive.   In the past couple of years, panda, penguin and  other types of search engine efforts to eliminate websites that they don't like have significantly changed how SEO must be done.  If the websites of your clients are being hammered by these then your company might not succeed.  They have to change from old SEO methods to new SEO methods that depend mainly upon quality websites and quality content.  If your company can't do that then you might lose your job.

Again, it is like traditional warfare.  Armies with smart generals who know how to do battle and how to adapt to the advancements of their enemies will have the best chance of survival.  However, even if they are the smartest general around, if they don't have the resources to compete their army will be overwhelmed.

Pay attention to the success of your company's clients.  If they are struggling then you might want to change employers.  If you are a smart and ambitious person who is good at code and good at writing then you might be able to survive personally by going to another company where the general is smart, adapts with vigor, enforces quality standards strictly and has clients who are having success.

Learn as much as you can so you are personally a valuable asset.  Improve your coding, improve your writing skills and pay attention to news about search.

Good luck.

Can she recommend someone to work at my office?

Nice analysis.  It is smart to look at performance by resolution.

I would collect more data.  Some people may visit your site several times before taking any action.

I'm a bit perplexed as to why you feel there is less content above the fold now though.

I usually view webpages on a 1600 wide monitor.  When your new page loads it spreads to about 1100+ pixels wide.  However, most people view webpages in a smaller browser window - especially those who view on tablets.   So, when I grab the edge of the browser window and start to narrow it, at about 1000 pixels of width both of your right columns disappear and the design collapses to a single column that has a very different presentation - with a small fraction of the clickable content options.

Try narrowing your browser window by hand and watch what happens.   I have not looked at your site on a tablet but it might not look like you think.

So, bounce rate and time on site are down.   Is the cash register slowing down?

About the designs.  I am not surprised that the original design had a lower bounce rate.  When someone lands on that page they had lots of content and navigation options above the fold.  And those options were highlighted with contrasting colors (blue top nav, green calls to action, three cartoony links on the right).  Your original site was toploaded and high contrast.

Your new site is low contrast (hard to find nav and alternative links because everything is white and nav links are teeny tiny type.   That reduces the visibility.  Also options for alternative content are now way below the fold.  Furthermore, what the visitor sees changes with his monitor width.  As the width of the monitor window decreases lots of above the fold content options disappear from view.  When monitor window gets below 1000 pixels options to click are tiny and the design becomes much less effective.  What does it look like on tablet in portrait format?

My vote is for the old design on producing a lower bounce rate, generating higher time on site and getting visitors to explore your content and products..

Any thoughts?

This "link ratio" stuff is BS.

Rand answered a Q&A question here in February.  He recommends keeping all content on the same subdomain.  He said that Moz tested it..

http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

I redirected a couple subdomains into folders and the results have been kickass.

I would focus all of my effort on beefing up the thin content and getting rid of the duplicate content.

That will kick up your code to content ratio.

I don't think that reducing code is going to be nearly as helpful.

Use a colon.   Requires one less space.

Your first words are "Custom Fabricator" which causes me some friction - This sounds like you might be b2b. Do you sell stuff direct to customers?

Thank you, Doug.   This is exactly what bothered me too.  I did think they were b2b from those words.

First, I am surprised that the CTR is so low because of your top ranking.  My goal with that would be to change the title tag and description tag to match the query as closely as possible and to elicit clicks.

If this was my site I would change the title tag to match the query.... and to elicit clicks.

I don't know your business so I am going to guess.

<title>Granite Countertops: Prompt Installation in St. Louis area</title>

They will see the name of your business in your domain.

Then I would change the description tag.   Study the adwords guys.  They have great descriptions...

Over 100 colors,  Fast, expert installation, Affordable countertops and replacements.  Tell them what they are looking for that you can deliver.

Thank you, Spencer.

What are the reasons? I need help with detailed solutions.

If you want carefully considered ideas, please share your domain.  Guesses will be a waste of everyone's time.

This sounds a little risky.

I would avoid doing redirects if possible.

If this was my site, I would get into my analytics and find out which 100 pages are pulling in most of the sales from people who enter from search.   I would then spend whatever time it takes to recode about five pages by hand,  using the best SEO practices within my ability.

I want to make them into something kickass.

After I did the first five of those pages, I would get in touch with a consultant, show her those pages (before and after shots), tell her the goal and have her give opinion on what might be done better.  When I do something big like this I always get second opinion from someone who does more SEO than me and who is smarter about it than I am.   I might ask a question on Moz or get a friend to look at something.   I always get advice from people I trust when doing this.  I don't worry about cost.   One taken opportunity can be worth literally a million dollars in the long term.  One screw up can cost many thousands of dollars immediately and millions over time.

So, after these consults I would launch a few dozen hand-crafted pages and see what happens.  A couple weeks later I would launch  more if the results were good.

The higher the value of these pages the more that I would do by hand.  Once I thought that I had things under control then I would write or have written a program to do the rest of the job automatically.

I am never in a hurry on a high value job like this.