Why are we not ranking? We have done all we can think of. Can you help?

[CompleteOffice]

We have an old domain that we have had for years now. And recently. December, we completely redesigned the site, I mean a complete overhaul, design, architecture, asp to php for example. Resubmitted to google via webmaster with a new site map etc.

Our website for reference is www.completeoffice.co.uk.

We are trying to rank in UK google, www.google.co.uk, for the term office refurbishment kent (we are on page 2) and office refurbishment (we are on page 17).

This is confusing me, because thats 7 pages lower than we were originally, before the site design, its better seo wise, duplicate content is none, title tage meta tags all correct, domain authority has doubled from 12 to 24 in a few months all in an effort to rank better. our homepage and office refurb pages both got an A on the on page SEOmoz tool test. So we dont understand why we are not ranking highly. It seems sites, much uglier and less seo friendly than our with same or lower domain authority are ranking at least 10 pages higher than us.

Why is this? Can anyone help or give us a few suggestions.

All help greatly appreciated. SEOmozzers.

[SEO-Doctor]

You need to build some anchor text links with 'office refurbishment' in, OSE is not showing any.

[MRobinson]

Hi,

When a new site goes live, your rankings will drop. Especially if you have changed the content, metas and URL's. I would recommend adding some more 'Google friendly' content to the homepage and maybe to the office refurbishment page too. Agreeing with Gareth, backlinks are important too. Maybe getting some backlinks using different permutations of the words Office Refurbishment.

Good Luck with your SEO and rankings.

[RobertFisher]

Complete

I think the first thing you should do is understand you are likely a bit impatient. Typically for us, when we build or redo sites, the rankings are all over the place - schizophrenic. This can last for a month or more. You can also see yourself on page one number 4 for example, pat yourself on the back, and two weeks later you can't find yourself.

For office refurbishment Kent, you are actually doing fairly well given the redesign and, likely due to some degree on your Google Places ranking so highly for that term. (you are number five).

On the SERPs main page, you have two urls that are  ranking: ** www.completeoffice.co.uk/Services/office_refurbishment.php   **ranks 2nd on page 2 and your home page ranks third on page two.

Now, as it is you have no page authority for /office_refurbishment so that is affecting you. I would first suggest cleaning up your urls as throughout the site you have some-with-dashes and some_with_underscores. This url as noted has underscores and they are not a best practice. So get some links to this page.

I don't believe you have done the "canonical redirect" to clear up the www and non www as OSE still shows two with no redirect and when I use either, either resolves. If you haven't, you need to do a 301 in the .htaccess file of the non www to the www and set the www as preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT). Otherwise you are showing as two sites.

So, there are some basic cleanup items (cleaning up the .php would be nice too) to do and some link building (this is how you get found page by page by the bots) for pages and you should do well given where you are and the work you are doing. Understand that we all wonder why a given site is ranked below another regularly, you cannot focus on that and must focus on your site and making sure you have done all you can.

I hope this gives you some help and that you rank one on one soon!

Best

[webfeatseo]

Most likely because of the url changes. I have a site that I have updated the design on several times in the matter of months with no loss to rank. Before you even launched it, you should have been working on it locally, making sure all on page elements were done, that 301's were ready to be implemented, and much more.

[CompleteOffice]

Wow, thanks for a great answer. You should write a YouMoz post on what to do with a complete site overhaul.

Moving on, I have done some of the things you suggested, I have done the non-www to www redirect. I have also set my preferred domain in webmaster tools. And also I redirected /index.php to my domain address.

When you mention clean up the php, do you mean clean the code up a bit or something else? I was going to give the Ontolo tool a go to see if that could help with link building prospects.

I will aim to clean up URLS this week, which will mean resubmitting a new sitemap. Btw, every time I add a new page to my website, does that mean I have to resubmit a sitemap to Webmaster Tools.

One of the best tips I have heard on Q&A btw. Thanks for the help.

[CompleteOffice]

Good point, I really need to do some of that. I was thinking about that Ontolo tool. Any others you can think of?

[CompleteOffice]

Yer thats a good idea. When you mean search engine friendly content, can you expand on that please?

[CompleteOffice]

I think I have sorted the 301s now. I agree I should really do that before launch. all a learning process.

[iung]

I would do the following things, not related to the site revamp :

1- create a page with the title office-refurbishment-kent.

2- Add more copy. Your office refurbishment page is short...

3- Your image on said page, is named or1.png. Rename it to office-refurbishment.png. Make a link from that image to another relevant page. Same for whyus.jpg etc. Each image is an opportunity to add a relevant keyword.

4- I'd create a blog about office refurbishment in kent, and I would write copy for that blog. Benefits, etc. At least a dozen 800 words posts, one per day. Each linked to your site and page...

[RobertFisher]

Thanks, but even though I mentioned links for that page, Gareth really helps with his comment regarding anchor text. That was a miss for me.

This is out of order: As to site map I would resubmit just to make sure, but if you have internal links to the page it will get indexed either way.

Removing the .php gives you a clean url. here is a good source and I have cut and pasted as well.  To remove the .php from StuntCoders

Just use following snippet in order to remove “.php” extension from URL.

| | ```
1 RewriteEngine on
2 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
3 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
4 RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php

Best of luck.
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