Moved a site and changed URL structures: Looking for help with pay

[mattylac]

Hi Gents and Ladies

Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post.

**The background story: **

My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is.

**Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: **

The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's...

Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area

New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto

My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds).

As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now.

SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other.

The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed).

**On to the questions: **

**What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. **

If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).

[Everett]

Hello Mathew,

I did a site:domain.com search and do still see some of the old URLs indexed so I checked the URLs using an HTTP header status code checker and they are returning the correct 301 response. I also checked the the rel canonical tag on the new URLs and they do reference themselves, not the old URLs. Therefore I see no reason to be concerned about this issue. It takes time for Google to revisit those old URLs, see the redirect, and update their index. In time the old URLs will drop off and any links going into them should begin counting toward the pagerank of your new URLs.

HOW.Ever...

You have dozens of geotargeted doorway pages that Google probably doesn't like, or that at least violate their guidelines. If there was an office in each location it would be the right thing to do, as you would include the geo-specific address and phone number. Since every page has the same phone number and presumably there is only one office, you are running into the same problem many other "local" businesses have had to deal with over the years. Unfortunately, there still isn't any real solution and you will have real trouble ranking in the local/maps area on Google.

What to do about this is beyond the scope of this question, but if you're going to work with another SEO on this I'd recommend one who has experience with service-oriented business with multiple locations. This page would be a good place to start, and I have pre-filtered it to show only "local search" experts.

Good luck!