Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)

[lzhou]

I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue).

Problem below:

I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is).

This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar).

A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months.

After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move).

Some things I've tried:

1. I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links.
2. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format
3. I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages.
4. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly
5. I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly.

See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA).

I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting).

renthop%2Bboston.png

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Lawrence,

I do think RickRoll's advice was good, and the first thing I would say is that you should leave those 301 redirects in place, on a page-to-page level, for a good long while - don't change them again. It looks like there are still some pages from boston.renthop.com in the index, which indicates that Google may not fully understand that these pages have all moved. There are only a few still in there, though, so I don't think that's the only issue.

One thing that can happen when pages 404 for a while is that even if you 301 them later, the link equity of the original pages can disappear (it doesn't always, but it can). So you probably want to spend some time building links to these pages/site sections, and where you can, I also recommend reaching out to sites that linked to the old subdomains and asking them to update the links. I'd recommend trying to get new links from local-specific sites (i.e. sites about Boston or Chicago, vs. nationwide/non-local sites about apartment hunting), and here's why:

In my experience, Google usually treats "{keyword} in {location name}" searches differently depending on whether or not you're actually in the location you're searching for. If you're not in the location, it treats {location name} as a keyword, but if you are in the location, it treats {location name} as a location. So for example, if you search "apartments in Boston" and you're not in Boston, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments in Boston" - but if you are in the Boston area, it will show you pages that rank for the term "apartments" and that have strong local indicators that they are in Boston, or more specifically, are near to you.

So since you rank nationally but not locally for this term, it sounds like the signals you need to focus on improving are local signals. You can do this by building links from local sites, by adding e.g. "Boston, MA" to title tags on individual apartment listings, and by building out some unique, locally-focused content like neighborhood guides to add value to searchers from that area.

I hope that helps!