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That's my thought as well (about link-purchasing/black hat), [insert expletive].

Like I said, horrible situation. I'm waiting on somebody to get me the login details, but even so, I suspect whomever was managing it prior to my team taking over a new site design would have actually deleted any notices to cover their tracks.

Short of a whole new domain, definitely no 301s, correct? It's going to take Herculean convincing to get somebody to approve a different domain, we are supposed to launch in a few days.

Thanks Jesse.

I didn't manage the site (and I'm not actually sure who did manage it, I just know it was managed terribly) but I should be able to get a look at the Webmaster tools. Thanks for the info about the tags, I probably should've realized that.

I just asked around and it sounds like the site was de-indexed just before Christmas 2012. Sounds like Panda (and like I said I suspect a shady link profile, but I'll dig further).

Thanks again.

Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes:

• New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible

• Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google)

• Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well

My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant).

So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct?

Thanks in advance for any quick answers!

Hey guys,

I've made a post or two before, but my story is that I've been learning SEO for a while now and have only recently (in the last four months) had the opportunity to actually apply what I've been reading about. What I've learned while trying to put these things into practice is that it can be pretty tough sledding, even when it comes to basic elements like keywords and search results.

Anyway, to the good stuff. I've been helping my brother's startup company in my spare time because I want them to do well. They're on the last legs of their series A funding and have no money to put towards SEO, content marketing or social, so I'm helping when and where I can for free.

The company is Maluuba, a siri-like personal assistant app for Android with a ton of different domains. They launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and actually have a lot of traction and a fair amount of publicity, so I'm not exactly working with scraps, but I don't work with them in their offices and only really communicate with my brother, who is having a really hard time getting buy-in for some of the stuff I want them to do.

Their initial website was pretty terrible, so my brother got the okay to redesign the site and together, we worked with a designer to implement the site I linked to. Because they have so many domains (search, social, organization) I thought creating specific pages along with a one homepage would be a good way to optimize for different things and funnel a wider audience to convert to the one macro goal of the site: getting people to download the app.

The results haven't been exactly what I expected and I fear I didn't really implement what I still think is a good plan correctly. I've only tried to optimize the pages for a few keywords to start. The main keyword for the homepage and indeed the brand is 'personal assistant app' which is a fairly competitive keyword that I know have them ranking second for on Google CA. I used 'siri-alternative' as a secondary keyword, since that's how they label themselves in the Play Store. For the three other main (pages search, social, organization) I used 'personal assistant app' as a secondary keyword and tried to optimize each page for 'search app', 'social app' and 'organizer app', respectively.

While I'm really quite proud that I managed to get a page ranking in the top three for our main keyword, I'm just as disappointed that it's the  search page and not the homepage, mainly because I have no idea why it's happening.

So, all of that to ask a few questions:

Did I make a mistake by trying to add funnels to the site? Or did I just go about optimizing the pages incorrectly?

Why does the search page rank really, really well for 'personal assistant app' while the other pages - including the one I intended to rank the highest for that term - lag behind? I'd guess that Google is indexing this page alone as the main representative of 'personal assistant app', but that wasn't my intention. I'm also not using any rel=canonical tags, if that matters.

Also, this page has been flipping around in the 1-3 range in the SERPs for about a month, but I still haven't noticed any traffic from 'personal assistant app'.

Alright, this is getting way to long. I'd very much appreciate any and all insights as to what I'm doing wrong or what I'm missing. It could be really obvious and thus make this post silly, but I really have read and tried to learn a lot. I just can't see what's going on here because I don't have any experience to compare it to.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers,

JD

Hey all,

I'm relatively new here and certainly new to posting in the forums and interacting with the community but I hope to be much more active in the coming months.

I have what might be a silly question regarding search results for a Google Play store-specific query. The company in question has their main North American app that's been out for a month and a half and then an International version that was released just a few days ago. If you run a Google search (NOT a search witin Google Play) for 'Google Play Company Name' the more recent (but less used and ultimately less important, at least for the time being) International app is higher in the SERP than the more used and reviewed North American app.

I'm guessing that this is something that will correct itself over the next week as the North American app establishes itself as the more important of the two, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask just in case there's something they can do to affect the results a little quicker.

Any advice, input or just a verification of my guess would be greatly appreciated!

Hey guys,

I've made a post or two before, but my story is that I've been learning SEO for a while now and have only recently (in the last four months) had the opportunity to actually apply what I've been reading about. What I've learned while trying to put these things into practice is that it can be pretty tough sledding, even when it comes to basic elements like keywords and search results.

Anyway, to the good stuff. I've been helping my brother's startup company in my spare time because I want them to do well. They're on the last legs of their series A funding and have no money to put towards SEO, content marketing or social, so I'm helping when and where I can for free.

The company is Maluuba, a siri-like personal assistant app for Android with a ton of different domains. They launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and actually have a lot of traction and a fair amount of publicity, so I'm not exactly working with scraps, but I don't work with them in their offices and only really communicate with my brother, who is having a really hard time getting buy-in for some of the stuff I want them to do.

Their initial website was pretty terrible, so my brother got the okay to redesign the site and together, we worked with a designer to implement the site I linked to. Because they have so many domains (search, social, organization) I thought creating specific pages along with a one homepage would be a good way to optimize for different things and funnel a wider audience to convert to the one macro goal of the site: getting people to download the app.

The results haven't been exactly what I expected and I fear I didn't really implement what I still think is a good plan correctly. I've only tried to optimize the pages for a few keywords to start. The main keyword for the homepage and indeed the brand is 'personal assistant app' which is a fairly competitive keyword that I know have them ranking second for on Google CA. I used 'siri-alternative' as a secondary keyword, since that's how they label themselves in the Play Store. For the three other main (pages search, social, organization) I used 'personal assistant app' as a secondary keyword and tried to optimize each page for 'search app', 'social app' and 'organizer app', respectively.

While I'm really quite proud that I managed to get a page ranking in the top three for our main keyword, I'm just as disappointed that it's the  search page and not the homepage, mainly because I have no idea why it's happening.

So, all of that to ask a few questions:

Did I make a mistake by trying to add funnels to the site? Or did I just go about optimizing the pages incorrectly?

Why does the search page rank really, really well for 'personal assistant app' while the other pages - including the one I intended to rank the highest for that term - lag behind? I'd guess that Google is indexing this page alone as the main representative of 'personal assistant app', but that wasn't my intention. I'm also not using any rel=canonical tags, if that matters.

Also, this page has been flipping around in the 1-3 range in the SERPs for about a month, but I still haven't noticed any traffic from 'personal assistant app'.

Alright, this is getting way to long. I'd very much appreciate any and all insights as to what I'm doing wrong or what I'm missing. It could be really obvious and thus make this post silly, but I really have read and tried to learn a lot. I just can't see what's going on here because I don't have any experience to compare it to.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers,

JD

Thanks Jesse.

I didn't manage the site (and I'm not actually sure who did manage it, I just know it was managed terribly) but I should be able to get a look at the Webmaster tools. Thanks for the info about the tags, I probably should've realized that.

I just asked around and it sounds like the site was de-indexed just before Christmas 2012. Sounds like Panda (and like I said I suspect a shady link profile, but I'll dig further).

Thanks again.