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As long as you return 404 this is good. But the question is "why search results in CMS are indexed?". And answer of this is "Joomla". I will keep them as 404. But there are other 404 pages there: http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=tombolis-article.pdf <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=tombolis-article.pdf http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=ethicare-dental-ad-april-2009.pdf <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=ethicare-dental-ad-april-2009.pdf http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=ethicare-dental-ad-may-2008.pdf <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/a-one-stop-shop-for-oral-health-needs/ http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/download.php?f=how-i-did-it.pdf <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/how-i-did-it/ Few domains that didn't exist anymore: file:///Z:/Clients/Current%20Clients/Ethicare%20Dental/Articles/JULY%20ARTICLES/Is%20the%20new%20best%20toothpaste%20in%20the%20world%20all%20its%20cracked%20up%20to%20be.docx <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/is-the-new-worlds-best-toothpaste-all-its-cracked-up-to-be/ http://www.hypnotherapydunstable.co.uk/img/dentist.jpg <- http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/taking-the-fear-out-of-a-trip-to-the-dentists-chair Few 301 that i would skip: http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/orthodontist -> http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/orthodontist/ http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/hygienist -> http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/hygienist/ http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/finance -> http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/finance-and-guarantee/ http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/zoom-tooth-whitening -> http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/tooth-whitening/ there are much more i just show 3-4 examples. And few more small issues. This is result of direct crawl now on site. If there was link as: http://www.ethicaredental.co.uk/blah-blah that i can't see it now anymore and it return 404 now. I would 410 it to prevent deleting them over and over from SearchConsole.

Hi Faye, It sounds like you are working hard to do good things for the business, but it could be that, if you're seeing this client floundering many pages deep in the SERPs, there could be other negative issues at play. Nothing can replace a formal audit in a case like this, but here are some suggestions: Go through this post, bit by bit: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit This one from me is a year old, and due to changes in Google, some of the methodology and terminology is outdated, but the problem concepts remain accurate: https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures Pay very, very close attention to duplicates. In the dental arena, practitioner duplicates are a very common problem. I recommend you read anything Linda Buquet has written about dental duplicates at her localsearchforum.com. You might also consider starting a thread there, as well as your one here, in hopes that she will turn her expert eyes on your case. Linda has more experience in Local SEO for dentists than any other pro I know. I hope these will be a start.

Many thanks Miriam and Eric.. Another Audit following your resources and a think again with content. Kind Regards Carrie

Looks like your client is part of a link network with exact match anchor text, check out these: http://cornhilldental.co.uk/index.htm http://www.modburydentalpractice.co.uk/ http://www.farcottondental.co.uk/links.html

The URL and page title ect seems to point towards Devonshire a county literally at the opposite end of the United Kingdom - Could this be having an impact? Your Moz rank is fairly low - Look to build this with high quality links within your industry.

Hi Marcus I'm going to just go through a bunch of items in no particular order; Internal links in footer - the anchor "private dental practice in york" linking to the homepage is a little over-optimized.  As is linking to the marketing and web design companies with exact commercial anchors. The actual brand name is a little unclear. Is it "fresh Smiles" or "FreshSmile" or "fresh dental" or "fresh dental smile clinic"? It's super important to have this clear to make a strong brand presence. "Fresh dental smile" and "fresh smiles" don't return a normal "branded" search result with 8 or 10 sitelinks. See this screenshot for an example. This has to be 100% clear on-site and off-site, especially in local listings. The homepage title tag for example is a bit overdone. It should be the main keyword / service and the brand name. Also, "cosmetic dentist" appears in almost every page title tag. You want to avoid repetition, have the titles describe the page well, while fitting in the main keyword for that page. Follow Google's guidelines on titles. For back links, there's definitely some over optimization going on - see Open Site Explorer's anchor text report - and the use of anchors like "dentists in york" "dentist york" etc is a bit excessive. Get those anchors changed to brand names if possible. Believe it or not, there's just too many links in general, and many of them are keyword links. What I mean is - you're not ever naturally going to see 100's of back links for a dentist. Google knows this. So it sends a red flag to have too many low quality over optimized links. I would stress obtaining a few links but of super high quality. Social Media - the facebook feed for example is just a blast of "push" marketing - teeth services, photos and so forth. Very minimal activity in general. They should pick maybe one social network that aligns with where their customers are and use it as a communication medium - a place where patients can leave messages, the office can post fun and engaging things. See Social Media Examinar for plenty of social ideas - I recommend possibly using either Pinterest or Instagram as well. Twitter doesn't make much sense for a dentist. I am mentioning social media because in my opinion it helps SEO. Rel Publisher - even if they're not posting activity on Google Plus (same as the Google places page now) use Rel Publisher to connect their website to their G+ page. Check that its set up correctly with the rich snippet tester Site speed seems poor - here's a test result from webpagetest - note that many of the images (like this one) are taking almost 1 second each to load. You definitely want to try to get those to say 50-75k with some compression etc. Site speed is a small ranking factor as well as UX factor for visitors. The site has a lot of pages indexed for a dentist web site - over 1,000 as you can see here. What I would do is see if they are all getting traffic (check in analytics) - and HIGHLY consider killing off pages like this: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/teeth-straightening-in-york/ which are is a blog post format, designed to just target a keyword and even the image is broken now. There are a LOT of pages like that indexed. Here's another: http://www.freshsmiles.co.uk/we-also-offer-patients-facial-rejuvenation-treatments/ - this will all seem like thin content for sure, and affect rankings. As you can see, a lot to work on! I don't think any one thing is going to fix the site, it's going to have to be a bunch of improvements. EDITED TO ADD: I would just kill the tag archives. Remove them from navigation and delete them. Check to see if a few might be getting traffic (using my method here) and 301 redirect the few that might be and just remove the rest. I was trying to crawl the site, and it's already queued up to over 1,500 pages - most of them tag archives.

Makes me want to re-train as a dentist in London, that's crazy and I'm speaking as a person who chipped their tooth today! As Jesse says.... go!

Thanks! I'm going to re do the navigation and add links at the bottom so hopefully google will now find the pages!

Thanks for you help with this Marcus - I'll certainly address the content and have a look at the link profile and remove any dodgy links and hopefully that will help! Marcus

Looks like you have Pro Plus, which has 1000 keywords.