SEO and former site

[mrodriguez1440]

Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server.  My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues.  For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason.  Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google.

He's got great content, and no spammy links.  This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com.

Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed?  Does it matter?  Or, is it simply a function of time?

Thank you for your help.

[dkeipper]

When you shut the old website down and moved to a new server, did the URLs change at all?  Did the internal link structure change at all?  If so, that's probably the number one problem.  I noticed the domain authority is only a 15/100 and there aren't many external links to the site.  That could have something to do with it.  If you're targeting the keyword "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", you may want to include that keyword more often.  I noticed it four times on the homepage but that keyword is battling against all the other content.  Try incorporating that keyword about four times every 250 words or so.  Without doing a site audit, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing it to rank low.  Just my opinion.  Hope it helps.

[mrodriguez1440]

The internal link structure is the issue.  It's completely different.  Any thoughts on how to remove the old link structure from Google, if that's even possible?

[dkeipper]

Unfortunately not really. Google will notice it's gone and will dig into the new link structure. You could include an xml sitemap to help the crawlers understand your site, but it's going to take time to gain value in those new URLs.  You may consider (if it's not too late), 301 redirecting the old pages to the new pages and pass some of the old SEO value to the new site.  Those new URLs have no SEO value until people start clicking, linking, etc.  Good luck and optimize as hard as you can. Of course, this is my option and if you get other feedback from elsewhere, I'd love to hear about it.

[BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb]

Looking at OSE, I disagree there there are no spammy links.  Did you see all of those EDU comment links?