Domain Change, Lost ranking on 1 keyword

[Cincinnati_WebTec]

Hey guys,

Long time follower of the Q&A forum, but don't post too often.  I'm having an issue I never came across.  We changed a domain from mpbuilderscincy.com to mpcincinnati.com.  We did the 301 redirect and all the SEO flowed through pretty well.  Most pages didn't even change in file structure so we didn't need to do page redirects for the most part.  Anyway, long story short, we are seeing the same rankings as we had before now (it's been about 2 months) except for 1 and only 1 keyword.  It's "Home Remodeling Cincinnati".  We dropped from page 2, to page 11 on Google and it won't budge.  Now on Yahoo and Bing, we are right back where we were before already with that keyword.  But Google just refuses to bump us back to where we were before the change.  The Home Remodeling page: http://www.mpcincinnati.com/Residential-Services/Home-Remodeling.aspx has an on page grade of A for that keyword and we have it as one of our main keywords on the home page of the site (title, h1, alt tags, etc).  No errors on the page.  I mean it looks pretty clean for this page as far as SEO except for 1 notice that mentions the 301 canonical redirect. We uploaded the new sitemap right away.  I just can't put a thumb on it and wondering if you guys had any tips.

Thanks,

Chris

[GPainter]

Hi Chris,

Can be hard to tell but you can also (compared to 301) get in touch with some of the webmasters of the links and get them to change the links then you don't loose anything.  I'm not showing any link to your page so that could also be causing a problem.   I'm sure there are loads of other bits but first thing I may look at it the above.

Good luck!

[saritsh]

Hi,

See what happens when you search for the following sentence in Google: 
"MP Builders is your one stop solution for all your Home Remodeling needs."

The home remodeling page is linked site-wide through the footer and includes that sentence. I suspect your site is perceived as over-optimized. Try changing the linking paragraph a little bit and remove 'home remodeling' from it.

[Carson-Ward]

The best advice I can give you is to check the 301 redirects. Also keep in mind that location and personalization could change the results. Try it on a few different incognito windows in Cincinnati just to be sure that it's actually lower.

I know this is late, but it's also possible that Panda is moving this page lower because it looks a little templated to me. The top image looks a little bit like a stock image, for example, and I can't see a next step in the content section. If I were you, I'd insert more examples of your residential work in the page (this goes for commercial, etc. too) and try to get a call to action in the content. A large form might not be ideal, but maybe a button above the fold telling the user what to do next.