Strange rankings on new website

[robert78]

HI All

My website is 10 years old, and has decent rankings. The domain is www.advanced-driving.co.uk

I have recently had a major overhaul of the site, before it was very outdated, with lots of duplicated content. My main keywords are "advanced driving course" and "advanced driving courses" both of which I am on page 1.

However, since I have been live with new site - (5 days) I am not ranking for some easy win keywords. I have submitted new content thought webmaster tools, and whilst some content is ranking, others are not. The content not ranking is fresh and unique ( have used copyscape on all new pages).

For example my homepage is on page 1 for "advanced driving courses london" - around rank 6. So I hand made some content titled advanced driving courses london to provide more of an exact match, outlining our courses in London and the routes we take - http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/defensive-advanced-driving-courses-london/

However, this page which is unique does not rank at all....I have done this with another website and it worked well, but google is not understanding this at all.

Also I am now on page 1 for "advanced driving course" but not for "advanced driving courses" - well I am but the page for the plural keyword is a page not really related - surely Googles semantic search should realise course and courses are the same!

I suspect that Google is still getting used to my new website? No errors or anything in Webmaster tools...

Can anyone confirm this - or outline if I have done something awful..!!

Thanks

Rob

[DirkC]

If you check your rankings in Search Console - do you see major fluctuations after the relaunch?

How do you track traffic - in the forum you seem to use Google Analytics. The other pages however do not contain an analytics tag.

Dirk

[CleverPhD]

Two things I found when using the Wayback Machine to look at your site

1. Did you setup 301 redirects from old to new content?

https://web.archive.org/web/20150225025506/http://advanced-driving.co.uk/

I pulled links to various and random advanced driving groups and they 404ed vs 301

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region5/

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region6/

Also on the page for driving lessons

https://web.archive.org/web/20150219123145/http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/

I pulled links to various and random advanced driving lessons and they 404ed vs 301

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/norwich/

http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/liverpool/

Looks like you did not properly migrate the URLs from the old site to the new site.  You should be seeing 404 errors in Google Search Console and so that can be a starting point to find what pages need to be updated.  It sounds like you tracked rankings for pages on the old site, start with those URLs and make sure they are 301ed to the correct new URL.

2. Site structure

On the new home page, you are not linking into any of the pages such as your Driver Instruction and Traffic Reports page.  Likewise, your header and sidebars used to link into your content.  Your new design is cleaner, but you pretty much blew up your previous internal linking structure.  Google will use your internal links to find pages to crawl and also to determine what pages are important on the website.  I see much much less of this on the new site.  You may want to consider updating how your internal linking is structured so that you are showing your users and Google what your most important pages are.

Good luck!

[robert78]

Hi CleaverPhD

Here is my responses:

1. These pages (advanced driving regions, driving lessons) were actually in conflict with my business (advertising competitors) and so had to be deleted. I removed them from Wordpress, and are no longer on the website so I could not 301 them...I have only recently bought the website.

2. You can see the traffic reports and Driving Instruction from homepage - if you click "Tips" and then at the footer of that page you will see both.

I am doing more internal linking but to be honest I think, from the outset, the website is clearly linking...maybe I am wrong..

[robert78]

Hi Dirk

The only fluctuations was when I had to delete a large number of pages when I took over the site as they were in conflict with my business, but other than that no massive drops in ranks. All the pages do include Analytics, and I can see all in Analytics too...Some visit the forum, other the skid pan training page, some driving tips etc etc....

[robert78]

Another strange (frustrating!) thing is that there are other websites with little content, few links and a low Moz rank who outrank me for locational based terms i.e: "advanced driving courses london" "advanced driving courses berkshire" "advanced driving courses cheshire"....

We all offer these courses around the UK, but Google doesn't "get" my site does this - I have even created a locational page search accessible from the homepage....