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Hi Bridget,

Thanks for the response.

There was no migration, all the URL's stayed the same, we just applied the responsive design to the current platform, so not sure if it was the responsive design that somehow got us started on the downward slope.

Hi John, appreciate you responding.We use Google Analytics and we have a couple of years of data to compare, which I've screen shotted and uploaded here
http://imgur.com/zfJWifh for you to have a look at. Basically in the pest control industry there are times in the year, usually during the warmer months, when pests are most active so there is always a spike en web visits from about September though to February and then it dies off a bit during winter.

Historically however, we have always been gaining traffic, and each year the spike in visits during the warmer months is bigger than the year before. This year however you can see (the blue line) that instead of gaining ground like we usually do, we're now heading in the opposite direction. We haven't changed any settings on GA and the drop in traffic according to GA has been mostly seen in the organic search results as can be seen in this summary for the same time frame as the graph http://imgur.com/ckwvq2f

I've also included a comparison of the last 2 months VS the same time period last year http://imgur.com/ahAYzYD

We've also had a serious dip in MozTrust and MozRank.

zfJWifh ckwvq2f ahAYzYD

The launch of the responsive design is the only event we can correlate to the beginning of the decline in overall visits to the website since July, however we're not sure if this is the issue.

To give you some background, the website http://www.precisionpestcontrol.com.au/ is a pest control site in a highly competitive industry where there are many black hat tactics going on with huge keyword competition on a small range of keywords, however historically the website traffic for the above site has been gaining momentum.

We create/ update 2 or 3 pages every month with rich content and post 8 blogs every month on pest control related topics. We have done the initial keyword research and all the keywords we used are medium to high volume terms.

We don't do any black hat tactics or dodgy link building, we have invested time submitting the site to legitimate business listings in the past. It just seems strange that all of a sudden we go responsive and start to lose searchengine traffic.

Possible Issues

What we've been able to find so far were some pages that were not redirected properly, probably about 5, and 2 pages that seemed to lead to a 404 error. These have only just been fixed recently, otherwise the mobile site has been functioning effectively.

Could this be the reason we have been in decline over the past few months?

We also seem to have lost a whole lot of external links somehow, the external link measurement in MOZ has gone from 1500, up to 6,000 then down to 300 or so in the space of a few months.

Basically we're trying to figure out what we're doing wrong, or what we can do to try and stop the decline of visits. We've checked the algorithm updates and don't think that Panda or the shift to the Google AI would have penalised us, but then again we could be wrong.

Any advice anyone could offer would be hugely appreciated. Happy to provide any data for anyone to have a look at.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Hi Everyone,

I was just trying to export the On Page Grader report for my clients website, and found that there is no longer that option.

Is this a permanent change with the new branding?

Would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks very much.

We are currently ranked 18th for the Sydney Vet keyword in SEO Moz ranking tools, however in organic Google search we are ranked third. This search was conducted without Googles personalised results feature.

Is this just an error? Or does it have something to do with Google Places not being counted in SEO Moz ranking tools?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the info guys

Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011.

Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18.

An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are:

http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13

http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\

However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages.

Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority.

Our website is www.anteater.com.au

Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?

Thank you all.

Our website has been experiencing a slow but steady decline in rankings despite our activity on social media platforms, is there any value in paying a large sum for bulk directory submission? Or will this only result in our overall website authority decreasing further due to unnatural links.

Would really appreciate any help.

Done! You nailed the 5% pretty good.

Thank you very much EGOL! I've just reverted back the URLs.

Really helpful. Thanks. I'm 95% inclined now to revert it back to www.anteater.com.au, just need additional comments from others regarding this.

Hi,

We have a site www.anteater.com.au. It's a pest control company here in Sydney Australia. Now I've just renamed it to www.anteaterpestcontrolsydney.com.au yesterday for SEO purposes. I'm doing 301 redirects.

My question is, is it worth it to do this? Will we have any advantage in the long run with just this URL change? Or would it be better to just leave it as is as www.anteater.com.au

Any comments would be appreciated.

Cheers.

Hi,

We have an existing site done in DNN and we recreated it on a new platform (EPiServer) and now we're going live.

However, there are 2500+ page URLs from the old site which is not exisitng on the new site. What do you reckon is the best way we can address this? Do we create a 301 redirect individually for each of these pages? These 2500+ pages have a domain authority 34-35 and I think it's best that we retain those. We'll be using the same domain name.

Suggestions for ways to approach this issue would be greatly appreciated. I have access to the server and IIS.

*Also, how do I create a virtual page in IIS? and redirect it to another URL within the site?

Thanks.

Sorry, but when you say "Google Webmaster tools," is it inside the seomoz pro dashboard? Or do I need to create a google webmaster account?

The reports I've given came from one of our Campaigns inside the SEOmoz PRo Dashboard. I don't see a Site Configuration here.

With the ?pg=2 parameter, is there a way for google not to treat it as two URLs with same title and at the same time make both appear in search results?

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. But I'm a bit more concerned with the example I presented wherein product pages are displayed on several pages where the first URL is identified by ?pg=1 and the second URL by ?pg=2

For the WWW and non www, we can fix that one, but for the sample I presented, I'm not sure how to go about it.

We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages.

The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title.

e.g.

Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products

MasterPet Product page1

MasterPet Product page2

Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title.

From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this?

Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.

Thanks Marcus. Appreciate your input and suggestions. Most helpful.

We have been hosting our website with a provider (their design and CMS) and we are now moving to a new design, better content focussing on keywords in a different CMS platform on different servers but want to retain the link juice from the old site.

We have used Open Site Explorer Report to determine all the links to the old site and the pages they link to.

What is the best strategy to keep the link juice flowing to the new site?

Example

This site <http: www.dogslifedownunder.com="" what-is-worse-then-going-to-the-v-e-t="">links to this page <http: 19105="" www.sydneyanimalhospitals.com.au="" ourstaff="" thevets="" tabid="" default.aspx="">on the old site.</http:></http:>

We will have a similar page on the new site with the same staff members called for example:

How do we ensure that the we retain the link juice?

Any thoughts most welcome.