Complex Rankings Issue For A Law Firm Site

[BrianJGomez]

Be warned, this is a complex issue that I have and will require someone who has some advanced knowledge about 301s and link penalty’s.  I have a law firm client whose site is having some issues. There are some very complex details here so I'm going to articulate them in bullet points in hopes of making the issues easy to understand.

So here's my root problem:

1. We have poor organic rankings (4th, 5th, 6th page for most terms) despite Domain Authority of 32 (avg. 1st page competitor is 28) and some very strong white hat link building the last 60 days or so.

How's their backlink profile look, you ask?

1. When you look at their backlink profile in OSE, their spam score is a 1/17 (not sure if that's credible in any way).
2. Lot's of links that score 5's on the spam score make up about 10% of their OSE links.
3. Here’s where it gets tricky; those links are not directed the client's New URL, they are links that go to some old URLs the client used to have, for which they had an SEO guy who built all those crappy links. Those URLs with the crappy links (we'll call them The Crappy URLs) were 301'd (can we all agree 301'd is a verb?) to the NEW URL for just a couple of months. Shortly after that, NEW URL dropped almost completely out of Google, so the client turned off the 301s.
4. So despite those 301s being turned off, OSE still shows all the links going to The Crappy URLs but is giving The New URL credit for them. Keep in mind, the 301s were turned off about 6 months ago so it’s a little strange that OSE still shows those 301s.
5. This has led me to the conclusion that the Domain Authority that OSE shows of 32, is not a “real” number since it is seemingly based off links inherited from 301s that no longer exist.

So now I’m trying to create an action plan for this client that will hopefully help us start to make some real progress in our rankings. This client does not have the budget to wait another 6 months for some sign of hope so time is of the essence. Here’s my theoretical action plans I’m choosing from and would like the communities input on which, if any, they feel is best (Also, if I’m missing something or you have an idea, I’m all ears): **Potential Action Plans: **

1. Do nothing, keep building quality links, creating quality content, monitor crawl reports/gwt for issues. That strategy is going to win long term.
2. #1 + Create one page sites on The Crappy URLs, setup GWT for them, submit sitemaps thus forcing Google, OSE and other web crawlers to index them, thus removing any potential residual penalties from the 301s. NOTE: Currently The Crappy URLS are just landing on GoDaddy’s default landing page which is of course not being indexed by Google or OSE.
3. #2 + Disavow all the bad links going to The Crappy URLS. Then once the bad links no longer appear in the OSE profile for each of The Crappy Sites, 301 them again, thus inheriting the good links but not the bad.
4. #1 + 301 the Crappy URLS back to the New URL, while also disavow any links going to The Crappy URLs. The logic here is that if the road back to recovery is going to be a few months away no matter what, when the 301 knocked them back 6 months ago no reputable link building was being done. I am cautiously optimistic the linkbuilding we are doing will eventually off set any penalty’s coming from the 301s. Plus now we’ll know the 32 Domain Authority OSE is giving us is real. This is the one I’m leaning towards quite frankly because I think it will reduce the recovery time and we’ll know somewhat quickly (30-60 days) if it’s actually working. 1-3 could each take 90 days before we know if it’s working.

So please, if you have any expertise with any of this, your help or advice would be appreciated. I’d rather not share The New URL for obvious reasons but if you must know, simply message me and as long as you’re legit, I’ll share it with you.

[Hutch42]

Brian,  a 301 is a permanent redirect, so while you have turned them off the link has already been associated with your new domain.  I would recommend reinstating all your 301s so that any legitimate traffic going to any of your links gets to your new site and then go through and disavow all of your spammy links. In general, when you have any spammy links you should ask for their removal and then disavow them if they are not removed while still creating 301s from all of your old pages for both legitimate links and traffic.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Have you gotten a second opinion at all besides Open Site Explorer?

You can get a second opinion by checking:
Links to Your Site (Google Webmaster Tools - this matters a ton - these are the links Google sees and wants you to know most about)
Majestic
LinkRisk

A couple quick questions:

• Do you have GWT set up for the new site? If not, do so for Google and Bing.
• Do you have GWT access to the old website? If not, see if you can somehow get that, or get one setup.
• What happened to rankings once the redirects were removed?

The reason I ask, I want you to see if you have a Manual Action of some sort. If the old site had a manual action, you'll want to remove it - you will do so by removing bad links and correcting good links to the new URL that are valuable and you wish to keep. You will also need to go through the process of a reconsideration request. In case you need information on that:
Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal (Moz)
12 Common Reasons Reconsideration Requests Fail (Moz)

If your rankings dropped immediately, you need access to WMT and also to conduct a backlink audit for both sites.

Here's what I would do:
Follow the steps I just listed above, but work on option 1, no matter what, sans "Do nothing" about the old links - you have to, especially if these links are somehow connected to your new site and appearing in your backlink profile - it could be a time lag from Moz crawls, but you need to take action in case, if nothing else, get a second opinion.

All of this depends on getting access to your WMT and seeing what's up from a Google standpoint. I would still try and clean up what you can and get both backlink profiles as clean as possible. It sounds like whatever happened with the old site transferred to the new site, so you'll have to approach both based on data collection and assessment.

Remove the bad, update the good.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments, good luck!

[BrianJGomez]

awesome, awesome answer here man. thanks for taking the time to respond. I went in and setup WMT for the old sites and things are looking a little bit better now.