Agree with Zakaria, hang in there, My niche was exactly the same, i tried to compete doing as the bad guys were and got penalised. thankfully im back on track, not where i was but traffic is steady.

If its any consolation I see the the spammy sites come and go, however the white hat sites are still there or about's .

Keep things real and don't cut corners you will get your rewards.

One thing i have noticed as that some sites can get away with a mixed bag of links, but my advice is don't gamble, do it right and reap the rewards

Good Luck

Hi Kyle

Submitted a site map originally,  Google can see and has indexed all the current pages and visits regularly, however non of the authority has been pushed over yet, not even all the PR..

Just must be super unlucky

I am really tempted to revert back, but i have had some extremely busy bot activity since i turned on those internal URLs for a few days as posted by

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

Although this image says humans they seem to be bots, the blue is current and the red line is last month so something is going on but not sure yet

Ill await another week then make a decision

Many thanks for taking the time to respond,

current-visitors.jpg

@ Billy

Thank you for responding

The link profile is not good in fact i have not linked to this new site that much as i wanted to see where i was before i embarked on a strategic plan of action, because i did not get much time i employed a third party to start a facebook and social media for me opposed to the linking however they thought they were doing me a favour by added random links.

I have many more than what you can see but most i have removed, i reported those to Google and showed them what i have done and they confirmed there was no manual penalty holding me back (no manual actions)

but i thought the 301 should push most of the link juice over from the old and that has not happened

I may just have to face facts that the 301 is not going to pass the juice over

but what my real question is why and where is the PR from the home page, there has to be an issue because the PR has gone to many inner pages but not the home

I thought like you did that im caught up in an algorithmic penalty but that wont pull PR from the home page and let inner pages have their page rank

Thanks

Done pretty much everything i can think of.

the content is identical to the old site as i just changed names  everything else including site structure is identical, the old site is totally removed from the Index (which only finished around 3 weeks ago (17k page site)

Had many of links changed over .. PR has updated  many of the inner pages but the home page is still a PR1, down From a 4 and if you copy text from any of the pages it wont show in Google search

This to me says i have an issue, but what that issue is i do not know, i had a problem a few years back where i missed the Http:// from an internal link and somehow Google had interpreted that as a 301, i fixed that and PR and rankings returned within 48 hours. this seems awfully similar and checking for this throws up nothing.

Also open site explorer still has the old site at a PA of 60 my new url at 42 with hardly any of the links moving over, so its just not Google slow or cannot read the 301 correctly

Header responses are what they should be so little lost on this one

Ill give it to the next  Link update which is the 11th and if not much else changed then ill remove the 301, but i was hoping there was something stopping me from ranking opposed to just bad luck

Hi

Im Looking at reversing a 301 i did 5 months ago, I originally changed names of a site for reasons where the site was going to be split into 2 where part of the site i would run and the other where i would get my business partner to run it

However since the 301 i have lost 80% of traffic and cannot find the reason as to what especially as everything looks perfect except the rankings, to put it into context 150 keywords i was tracking all were page 5 and below with 40% being page 1

Now only 7 from that same 150 are in the top 10 pages (First 100 results), The issue i have must be very rare as i have posted for help with little or no response, which tells me that the kind people who have looked could not see any issues as this is normally a very helpful community (below is the last thread i asked for help)

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-to-get-those-juices-flowing

So 5 months on i am considering removing the 301 and hoping that some kind of normality returns by reinstating the old URL

So my question is that is what im about to do wise, do i have any options, is this something you have done in the past if so how did you get on

Thanks in advance

HI Guys

Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back,

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking

i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me

My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything.

here are a list of things i have tried

1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess

2: added canonical tag to all pages

3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results.

I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons

1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1,  2 and 3 sporadically

2: If I copy text from home page no results

3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site

4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site

5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s

6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions

7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally

it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense

I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious.

Thanks in advance

Its a myth, as what would stop anyone posting spam comments on a blog to help it rank, just search the web 1000's of sites with 1000's of comments

However im going back to the original answer i gave , if you have a very well written content that people are visiting and commenting on then yes Google and the other search engines will follow this and see all the activity which would be a good thing which could increase your authority and then hopefully your rankings, then you hope someone shares your post (which will attract a few links)

Do it right and then the rewards will follow, any tricks are short lived and will catch up with you in time

Well if your site is worthy of a link you will get the links, if its just a run of the mill site then your correct no one will link to you unless you have something of worth for them, and that could be excellent content

High PR wont do anything for you at this stage so why the urgency ?

Have you thought about sponsoring a site, taking advertising out on some selected sites, even guest blog if your content is up for it.

Don't concentrate on trying to manipulate Page Rank, instead concentrate on getting unique quality content added to your site, content that will encourage people to link to you and this my friend will increase your page rank naturally.

But in answer to your question get some links from High Pr sites linking to you that will increase page rank too.

You may be looking at different data centres, or it could be on your pc/laptop you could have web history enabled, it wont be one set of ranking per device

Well if your site is worthy of a link you will get the links, if its just a run of the mill site then your correct no one will link to you unless you have something of worth for them, and that could be excellent content

High PR wont do anything for you at this stage so why the urgency ?

Have you thought about sponsoring a site, taking advertising out on some selected sites, even guest blog if your content is up for it.

Hi craig

There is loads you can do, first off get some text on the home page, image only pages do not tend to rank very well

Change titles, you do not need to have your domain name in the title if you are looking to be found lets say the example you gave then a tiltle like

<title><span>Edinburgh Kitchen Fitters, Designers Of </span>Q</span><span><span>uality Kitchens Scotland</span></span><span></title> (each page must be different to rank for its contents)

you need to add a description

As your using word press download the SEO all in Plugin this will help add these Meta Titles, descriptions and help with some other On page SEO elements for you

Just by doing the above there is no reason you wont make page 1 in your local area the competition is fairly low.

Also use the Blog and get some content written regularly, and publish that and article here and there on your own site could do well, or utilise the blog as a diary of current installations, i know a bathroom company that does that and they got all their links from people following and publishing his before and after images and that was enough for them to dominate their local area and booking work out for 6-8 weeks in advance

Good luck the site looks nice but needs content

I quite like the new look,

its the first time i viewed the site and the colours look great

you have the email down the right hand side i cannot read it , you need to change the colours, it also looks like you have Google analytics installed twice

I also see many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages, just search hypertension why send the same keyword to different pages, could explain some ranking drops as Google wont know what page to favour for those links, and there are better ways to distribute the sites internal linking

Do you really need 3 forms on one page for a newsletter sign up ?

Other than that great job

And Good luck for the future

Its a myth, as what would stop anyone posting spam comments on a blog to help it rank, just search the web 1000's of sites with 1000's of comments

However im going back to the original answer i gave , if you have a very well written content that people are visiting and commenting on then yes Google and the other search engines will follow this and see all the activity which would be a good thing which could increase your authority and then hopefully your rankings, then you hope someone shares your post (which will attract a few links)

Do it right and then the rewards will follow, any tricks are short lived and will catch up with you in time

I dont think there is a right or wrong answer, except don't do the spam

Some of the best links i ever had i got from a 1 man band and cost me $400 for around 100 links, there were some great gems in there, I have also paid a well established company 10X that fee and got not much more than spam.

• Personally I would go with a bit of a mixture, try some guest blogging, really don't have to be actual blogs but you could approach company's for a link in return for some great content
• You could hire a virtual assistant for $400 per month but do vet anything they will do for you before they do it
• You could submit some great articles or content to your own site and hope they will get linked to

Again all depends on your niche and is such a hard question to ask, if your in the insurance market then 4-5k per month if your a local business then no more than 1k even less

Guys

I really have an issue that i know have but cannot see if that makes sense.

Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

Every thing looks good get all the correct header responses , all canonicals work perfectly , Google webmaster tools is updated fetch as google bot shows the old site is 301

I tried the seomoz crawl test today on the old domain and got this message

Oh no! Looks like the page you were trying to access is temporarily down

which at first thought ok because the site was not there it wont do it on an old 301 domain, however i tried it on a domain i know has just been 301'd and i got this message

The URL http://www.site1.com/ redirects to http://site2.com/. Do you want to crawl http://site2.com/ instead?
Would you like to:
Continue with www.site1.com
Continue with site2.com

I really do not know what to do, its either the redirect script is missing something however its doing what it should or the server is a problem but again its doing what it should so why would SEOMOZ not be able to crawl the old URL like it example site above.

Now the strange thing is Open Site Explorer does see the 301 and asks if i want to check the new URL instead

Ps the redirect is done using PHP redirect which i am asking him to change to a htaccess as its now on a apache server and was wondering if this could be an issue, all pages go to correct pages as requested

Thanks in Advance

Agree with Zakaria, hang in there, My niche was exactly the same, i tried to compete doing as the bad guys were and got penalised. thankfully im back on track, not where i was but traffic is steady.

If its any consolation I see the the spammy sites come and go, however the white hat sites are still there or about's .

Keep things real and don't cut corners you will get your rewards.

One thing i have noticed as that some sites can get away with a mixed bag of links, but my advice is don't gamble, do it right and reap the rewards

Good Luck

The penalty wont pass through a 301 and that's 100% , however if you have Panda or Penguin issues that are not cleared before you 301 the site then the algorithmic penalty will picked up.

If a site had a penalty and was passed, then all i would do is 301 my penalised site to my competitor , As Mark Higgins who responded in this thread has done a 301 and all initially ok but i bet there are issues and would like to see the timeline of of drop after the initial 301