Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?
-
I've seen our SEO drop to more or less the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have any answers yet as to why.
SEOMoz is running it's crawl currently, and I have a few errors about duplicate titles and content, so I know I have some work cut out for me. But, why the sudden drop?
The only change I made at the time was a change to our URL structure, but all links were 301'd to their new location. Does this still hurt SEO that terribly?
Also, our robots.txt file is getting indexed and showing up as the first result at times. Very embarrassing. It's doing better than our other pages. I don't get what's happening here.
-
Were you logged into Google when you did this search, when you saw your sites? If so Google was showing you results based on personal search. Sites that you've clicked on recently will show up on the first page.
-
We used to be in the first page results for "thantakit international dental center", but now nowhere. I've attached a screen cap of our issue with the robots.txt file showing up for the results as well.
-
Mr. Rock,
First, thanks so much for helping me out. This is my first question to seomoz and I'm an SEO newbie. So far I'm amazed at how much people are willing to help and how quickly I'm getting answers.
I'm thinking of dumping our site map and just making our site more crawl-able in general. 5800 URLs does sound a bit steep... I will look into Xenu.
As for the URLs, the url structure is like this:
/dentists/[country]/[city]/[clinic name]
so what you presented is rather normal, it just so happens that the clinic name is so generic, so it looks kind of funny. Do you think there would be a better way to present the clinic landing page? I chose this so that there was a standard hierarchy for drilling down into the clinic landing pages.
Again, that's a ton. It is my #1 priority to tune the site for SEO right now and it looks like SEOmoz and its community t'll be a key tool in doing so.
-
I think I found a few things that you can focus on first.. Do a quick search with a free tool called Xenu and I just and the tool and it finding a ton of broken links, pages that are no longer active. You will wan't to go through and clean those up first. Since it gives a bad visitor experience when the find something that maybe helpful and they click the link and it is dead... You can keep visitors on your site just by making this change.
The crazy thing is Xenu crawled 5886 URL's ???? Do you have that many pages? IF not you maybe having some database issues.
Another thing that may have you in the dump is from the Panda updates with low content to page ratio with this like below, as it looks like from the sitemap I ran you have a ton of these..
http://www.dentaldepartures.com/dentists/mexico/cabo+san+lucas
that then goes to this page for more details:
http://www.dentaldepartures.com/dentists/mexico/cabo+san+lucas/cabo+san+lucas+dental
I hope this helps, just food for thought.
-
Just got finished reading the dialog, you mentioned landing pages that use to rank and they do not now.. Can you direct us to one of those landing pages that had in the past gernerated leads?
THx
-
no prob, phil. I know I have a tendency to be a bit vague.
I have analytics set up and have attached a image of our impression drop over the past few months. We pretty much don't exist on the web these days.
We used to be #1 for many of the clinic landing pages. A search for "Sani Dental Group" would place us #1, now it is on page 15 or something.
Maybe we pissed off google? We're working on updating our content and we need a marketing guy pretty badly so we can get our name out there, but I was hoping there were some things a lowly developer like myself could do in the in meantime.
Edit: added image
-
when you say "we have no links" are you saying throughout the site? or other sites pointing to us? (or both)
I can fix the internal links no problem. I'm already working on a solution for that currently. As for links to our site, that is always the toughest part, right?
-
Links links links. You have no links. Majestic SEO says your best link is this...
http://bangkok2night.com/links/ (slightly NSFW)
-
I know it seems like I'm just answering your questions with even more questions, but I promise I'll eventually be helpful :).
Do you have Google Analytics set up on your site? If so, I'd suggest digging in to find out exactly where you're losing this traffic. Did a specific keyword drop off? A certain type of keyword? A certain landing page? A certain section of your site? etc.
-
Well yeah you've got to build some high quality relevant links. Your site is not just going to rank from on page optimization unless it is a very uncompetitive niche. Which Dentists is probably going to take some linkbuilding.
-
the change happened last month as seen in the image. I haven't been doing any link building yet, so I guess that's on my list of things to do.
-
no, we haven't changed our site location.
-
Duh, sorry guys: dental departures
-
My guess is that you got hit by the penguin update. What kind of linkbuilding have you been doing? Also it would be nice to see the site and no what keywords you were targeting.
-
Did you recently change your sites location?
-
If you're willing to share the URL of your site then some of us here might be able to help. It's hard to analyze and offer suggestions without seeing the site since there are so many different things that it could be.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Regular Expression Question
We are having a little trouble coming up with a goal that shows how many product pageviews we are getting but I need to exclude search results pageviews that (unfortunately) have the same URL structure. Because it's an outside CMS, we have not ability to change the URL architecture. Products are on these types of pages: https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/Porsche+Boxster+Asheville+North+Carolina+2016+Rhodium+Silver+Metallic+536911 https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/Audi+A4+2.0T+Premium+Plus+Asheville+North+Carolina+2015+Gray+638379 Search results pages have this URL structure: https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/new/ https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/?condition=new&make=Porsche&model=Boxster https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/used/ https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/?condition=used&model=A4+2.0T+Premium+Plus I am hoping to create a GA goal with regular expressions showing only the product pages and not allowing the search results pages show up. Here's what I have, it's not working - any regex experts out there who can help? /inventory/[new/][used/] Thanks as always MOZ friends!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Ok. I'm just going to cut loose with my stupid question. What is internal link equity? What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity?
What distinguishes an internal link with equity from one without equity? Is there a limit to how many of these I want? What's the rule-of-thumb? Cheers, Wes
Reporting & Analytics | | wrconard0 -
SEO & CPC
So...I know Google secret sauce is just what secret but on a couple occasions I've seen a Phenomenon occur that I'd like some help understanding. I work at a fairly new eCommerce sit called www.savvisdirect.com. We have the normal new site desires...more traffic. Most of our traffic is coming from CPC but we were seeing about a 33% increase in organic wk over wk, until...we drastically cut our CPC spend on Google for a wk. Then organic dropped by about 1/3'rd. Nothing else changed, that's it. I know Google says that CPC spend doesn't affect rankings but I've seen this phenomenon a couple time @ a couple different sites & I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe it. What's your perspective on this?
Reporting & Analytics | | RPD0 -
Can someone clarify the importance of Scribe SEO?
Hi guys, I was reading The Beginner's Guide to SEO and was confused about the importance of keyword density. As I see it, the main purpose of tools like Scribe SEO revolve around analyzing keyword density, however, Chapter 9 of "The Beginner's Guide to SEO" seems to downplay its importance and says "Despite being proven untrue time and again, this myth has legs. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important metric. It's not." If this is true, what is the real value of tools like Scribe SEO? Currently, I follow keyword analysis tools very closely, and try to get the recommended density in my articles to help build back links. Should I be focusing heavily on the density and prominence of keywords like I am in the picture below, or is there another way you suggest I go about using these tools? PhJnV PhJnV
Reporting & Analytics | | samersultan10 -
Can you re sit the Google analytics IQ test?
Damn I just failed the Google analytics IQ test with a score of 65% 😞 You need 80% to pass... My natural instinct is to resit but after 30 mins of googling around Ive got no answer to the following question: "Can you resit the Google Analytics IQ test for free or do you have to pay again". Any insights welcome...
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing0 -
What is the SEO Impact of Adding a Directory to URL
I would like to add a new directory named “products” for all of the product detail pages on my site. Instead of having the URL for a product be “mysite.com/product-details-page.aspx” we would like to change it to “mysite.com.com/products/product-detail-page.aspx.” I want to do this to enable us to add product pages to our traffic funnel analysis by filtering visits to the "product" directory - right now we can't track visits to product pages in the funnel because they are just one-off the main site. I know this change will require redirects for every single product. Is there anything else that needs to be done? My main question is, will this change negatively impact the SEO value of the product pages? We have several product pages ranking in the SERPs, and I don't know if pushing them one directory further will change that. Thanks for your input!
Reporting & Analytics | | pbhatt0 -
Question for SEO experts!
I am checking my competition with all the metrics available and I have no clue why we are not coming up higher in ranking on Google. It's been 3 months and we've been bouncing between 9 and 7 position. One competitor just came out of nowhere with almost 600 internal links and few external links and occupied 3rd spot. I've built pretty good portfolio of links with links even coming from Google for crying out loud. My on page optimization is very good, we've even passed W3C with no errors. At least 3 of our competitors above us have less Domain Authority, Page Authority, Back links for external domains, number of external domains, etc... Not sure what is going on. We are not really trying to be the top dog in Google all the time, but it is the principle of a thing. Keyword is Laser Marking. Our domain starts with cms. Don't want to type the whole URL because Google might crawl (maybe a bit of paranoid at this point LOL) Any suggestions?
Reporting & Analytics | | DmitryP0 -
Analytics, Traffic and Rankings. Something is wrong, can you answer it? ;-)
So I've been monitoring analytics to see where our clients are ranking for terms that have brought visitors to the site over the last month to find that the website isnt ranking in the top 100 for that keyword. What are your thoughts on this? Why do you think this could happen? One of the keywords has brough over 700 visitors in the last month yet is not in the top 100 for this term. I've also looked Google Webmaster Tools and have found that the exact same term hasn't had 700 impressions let alone 700 click throughs! Weird! Cheers, Sean
Reporting & Analytics | | 0111001101100100