Redirects, SEO and More

[underdogmike]

Website errors remittent of Chernobyl.

First of all, I ask a lot of questions of the community and I don't do a lot of answering. For that, I am sorry!

I own a small SEO company and the majority of my clients are upstarts just like myself. We try to do the best we can on a very limited budget.
With that said, the client website in question, http://bestdefensega.com has been a struggle to rank in the metro atlanta lawyer market.
Here's the story. My client is a new solo attorney that practices criminal law and personal injury law. We launched bestdensega.com to focus on criminal defense and my client has also paid AVVO for a website as well. We recently decided to make a monster website that would have 50+ pages and be representative of all that he practices.
I recently put a temporary redirect on bestdefensega.com and pointed it to the avvo website while I was rebuilding the website. I did this using a plugin.
This morning I decided that I wanted to remove the redirect, so I deactivated and deleted the plugin. The redirect is still in effect. I suspect that this may be a cacheing scenario.
How do I undo a redirect?
Also, I noticed that the AVVO site has all of a sudden shot up to the top of the search results and bestdefnesega.com has dropped past the 3rd page for our keywords.

Have I lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice?

Also, bestdefensega.com has a spam score of 7. Why?

There are no shady links and everything I do is on the up and up.

Also Open Site Explorer says that bestdefensega.com doesn't have any inbound links.
Google WebMaster Tools says that the site has of 500 inbound links..

Frustrated,

Thanks

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

First, according to ScreamingFrog, your site is returning a 500 server error - so Google and other engines are probably hitting it and thinking "Okay, this site has issues" and ranking it accordingly. I would fix that as soon as you can.

Second (just an FYI), you have no contact information on that page, so while your users hit that page and see your site is down, they also have no way of contacting you. I would change that.

Third, I would imagine that Google is ranking this AVVO page for branded terms because it has information about your client, contact information, and also has branded content & a branded domain. So it's getting the benefit of the doubt.

Personally, I like the name of this domain so much more. It's branded, it speaks to the user, and it's easy to remember. The bestdefensesaga.com domain tells me absolutely nothing and I feel like if I were looking for your client, I would see that domain name and ignore it - basically assuming that this isn't the site I am looking for. Google likes brands, users like brands, and this bestdefensesaga.com isn't going to help in that area at all.

I would discuss this with your client, because you could be missing a major opportunity to capitalize on a branded domain and branded search.

That being said, I would also focus your efforts on local SEO and put time in there - you should be getting backlinks from more citations & listings, especially being a local business.

Hope this helps - good luck!

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Mike,

Patrick makes some good points, especially regarding the site returning a 500 error; as long as you're returning a server error on this site's only page, it's unlikely you'll be able to rank for anything. The fact that the AVVO page is ranking instead is far, far better than nothing.

It looks like the site is no longer redirecting, so I suspect you're right about it being a caching issue.

You haven't lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice permanently; once your server error is resolved and the new site is live, those links will still pass value. If there are pages that used to be on bestdefensega.com that will no longer be there, make sure those are 301 redirected to their nearest equivalent and, where possible, reach out to the sites that link to you to ask them to update the links, and it should be fine.

You can view the reasons behind the low spam score by going here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=bestdefensega.com. It looks like most of the problem is that you just don't have many links pointing to the site, and the ones you do have are lower-quality. Some of the other flags, like ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains and percentage of branded links, may be somewhat skewed by the small size of the data set.

OSE is now showing that you have 5 inbound links to the site; Majestic has you at 231 links from 9 domains. It's not uncommon for tools to show different numbers on something like inbound links. Each tool crawls and stores link data differently, and links may or may not show up in each tool based on factors like age, trust/authority, etc. Whether you have 500, 200 or 5 links, that's still not very many links - and it looks like most of them are coming from just a few domains. So once you've got the new site up and running, make sure you're investing some time and effort into a long-term link earning strategy. To Patrick's point, getting links and citations from other businesses/websites in your local area will help build your brand and send a strong local signal. Good luck!