Rankings dropped, returned for 10 days, and dropped again. I've never seen this before.

[rcseo]

This post is deleted!

[Marcus_Miller]

Without a link this is a real shot in the dark but if the pages are indexed still (as they seem to be) and they still return for the "keyword in quotes" type searches that used to return them well then... that wreaks of an internal duplication or some other duplication that can kick you out of the results.

You say you have moved over to WordPress which whilst great (and my favourite) it is easy, to easy, really easy, to create lots of duplicated content if the taxonomies are not well thought out and if you have not noindexed certain pages that lend themselves to duplication like tags, author archives, date based archives etc.

WordPress is awesome, but it's easy to make a hash of things so.... with nothing else to go on and based on the 'symptoms' that is the first place I would look..

Happy to dig a bit deeper if you want to post or PM a link.

Marcus

[SEODinosaur]

Just as Marcus mentioned without a link we cannot really analyze your site. However I would highly recommend setting up your wordpress with this SEOmoz article

[Marcus_Miller]

Jesus, that's an epic wordpress post, just skimmed it, that's some good work from the brave soldier that put that one together.

[rcseo]

I'd be happy to. The site's URL is www.bandleandzaeske.com. Searching for terms in the city/county-specific section (which no one else, other than legal directories, optimizes for) is the most perplexing part.

[NoahsDad]

I 1 up that article that Donnie linked to. It's great, and Dan did a great job on it.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Max

Provide some examples

search term - page - previous result (approx)

Do that and ill take a five minute look for you.

Marcus

[rcseo]

Jackson WI divorce attorneys

http://www.bandleandzaeske.com/milwaukee-family-law-firm/jackson-wi-family-law-attorneys/

They were once ranked No. 1, now they're not even in the top 100.

On-page sidenote: The content is somewhat thin, but original, and was not a hindrance for ranking first overall for the term between June 9 - June 20.

Thanks for your help.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Max

"On-page sidenote: The content is somewhat thin, but original, and was not a hindrance for ranking first overall for the term between June 9 - June 20."

I think you have pretty much answered your own question here. The content is thin, supermodel thin, and there is little in the way of strong content across the site to prop these pages up.

They are unique, but not really, in that there are several pages designed as search engine landing pages that offer little in the way of new or useful content. The link profile is pretty weak and there is no other useful content on there.

Get some solid content on there, offer some value to site visitors, get some good links and improve these pages and you should bounce back.

This is just a quality issue, plain and simple.

No waving of the magic SEO wand here unfortunately, it's just a quality thing.

Marcus

[rcseo]

Thanks for your help. That was one of our most recent theories, so we've actually been working on improving the content on their location pages for a week or so. At the very least, your diagnosis helps validate that work.

The one thing that remains perplexing is that the drop, then rise, then drop in rankings. The site was doing fine with the thinned out content before we switched it to an iThemes-designed WordPress site. At that point everything plummeted for two months, exploded back onto Page One for 10 days, and then dropped out again.

If the site's rankings had fallen and stayed there, I likely wouldn't have as many questions about what happened as I do now, especially since quite a few of their competitors gunning for similar keywords have more nefarious backlinks and similarly thin pages. Then again, the entire process could have coincided with an algorithm update or something else on Google's end.