Local site went from dominating first page - bad plugin caused duplicate content issues - now to 2nd page for all!

[OhYeahSteve]

I had a bad plugin create duplicate content issues on my Wordpress CMS - www.pmaaustin.com  I got it fixed, but now every keyword has been stuck on page 2 for search terms for 4 months now, where I was 49 out of 52 keywords on page one. It's a small local niche with mostly easier to rank keywords. Am I missing something?

p.s. Also has a notice on the Dashboard that says:

"404 Redirected: There are 889 captured 404 URLs that need to be processed."  Could that be a problem?

Thanks,

Steve

[MoosaHemani]

This has happen to me with one of my website; I fixed everything but happen is that the website got stuck when it comes to ranking. Here is my advice what you should be doing!!

-          Re-audit the website and make sure that the website is fixed as far as the on-page optimization is concern.

-          If you have a physical location, make sure you have listing on all major local citation website.

-          Create exclusive and quality content that have the ability to get the eye of your targeted audience and get some quality backlinks back to the website.

-          Do some guest blogging on quality blogs within your niche. Make sure that blogs you are targeting are quality and relevant to your niche.

-          Increase social shares of your websites.

I know it’s a lot of work especially for a small website but in order to get the rankings back this idea worked out for me.

I believe the idea is to give Google a hint that you have fixed the things that was stopping you from being an ideal candidate for the first page and now your desive the first page rankings again.

Hope this helps!

[eugenecomputergeeks]

Yea one of the newest Google updates punished sites with duplicate content.   Ebay is a perfect example.  You don't see them in the SERP often at all now, because they cannibalized themselves with duplicate content, especially on categorie pages that have tons of duplicate content.  Every page should have at least some unique content.  Sure you can use canonicalization but it can be tricky and personally I feel it's better to elimate duplicate content whenever possible or at very least don't have duplicate pages.    Add content to a page if you have to.  (Source:  From a famous SEO podcast I won't mention unless its allowed.)

[ProductPearson]

Sorry, but this isn't particularly a true statement. They were indeed hit by some rankings drops for their category based pages which featured automated results, however their item pages and pretty much everything else still completely dominate.

This is due to a combination of relevance, age of the domain (1995 or so? almost 20 years!!), and the fact that they have such a diverse, huge amount of content on a high authority domain.