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Hi There

A redesign can definitely impact rankings. I also notice some slight architectural changes? The removal of "Cases" from the main navigation, among other things.

The trick is, there's tons of moving parts in any ranking situation like this.

Also, what rank tracker are you using? There's going to be a lot of localization/personalization/fluctuation in effect. Google is likely greatly varying rankings by location, user metrics, search history etc. Are you using a de-personalized rank checker? I like Authority Labs or Advanced Web Ranking for daily rank checking.

FYI, I just ran it through the Firefox Rank plugin and got #19 and #18 for your two keywords (I'm in Massachusetts).

Also, for all sites I track I tend to see way more ranking fluctuation for page 2 and beyond in general.

I would really focus on best practices - like great UX, local SEO efforts, CTR optimization - all the "known" things you can really control.

Something you can do - go to Search Console - and make sure all the queries you are ranking well for have the best title/descriptions and snippets for those SERPs to improve your user metrics for the site overall.

I do not think that's a simple yes or no.  It depends if the search triggers a 7-pack or blended result.  I would read this article on local ranking factors, its considered one of the best sources of info right now on the topic.

-Dan

Hello!

I wanted to make you a screen video as it's a bit more nuanced, here's the link:

https://www.useloom.com/share/ebddf32363444e6a9cbc2ddfab639612

(Sorry for my voice- had a cold!)

It's 5mins, definitely watch!

But in very brief summary - Google is ranking two types of content: property listing style pages, and articles. You can have two pages - one of each type and they won't cannibalize each other.

You can add markup to videos in your website even hosted on YouTube. Here are a few resources;

• http://www.sistrix.com/video-rich-snippets/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/time-come-actually-create-video-rich-snippet/90953/
• http://www.branded3.com/blogs/how-to-add-rich-snippets-for-video-seo/

The problem as you mentioned, is the fact YouTube will most likely outrank you depending on the specifics of the query. You may try making the videos "unlisted" (that is people can only find the YouTube URL with a direct link) but still embed. I don't have direct experience with this though.

Ultimately, to rank a video on your site with rich snippets etc you may want to self host with a platform like Wistia.

Also, whichever platform you use, don't forget to create a video sitemap. This is a great resource on Distilled about video sitemaps: https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

Yes there can be big impacts, as template changes may result in any of the following changes:

• Design and UX
• Site Architecture
• Internal Linking
• Page Speed
• Other possible inconsistencies between themes, depending on your WordPress setup in general (title tags, structured data, etc)

In general, to mitigate against these, I would do the following:

• Design and UX - at minimum take a 'gut check' and be sure the new theme is a design and UX improvement - ie: is content still above the fold? Are there any weird scrolling issues (I see this sometimes with themes that try to be too fancy), are the menus still easy to navigate?
• Architecture - make sure the new theme doesn't break anything like your URL structure, or pagination links to archive pages etc.
• Internal linking - aim to keep your menus (main nav, drop downs, footer, sidebars) exactly the same at least for now - if your footer nav has links to important pages for example and those links go away, this might hurt the performance of those pages.
• Page Speed - as Donald astutely noted, make sure the new theme is at least the same in page speed, or better an improvement. You can use a few tools like WebPageTest or GTMetrix to test.
• Other - also as noted, try to get your SEO settings situated correctly before making the switch, and use the Yoast plugin. Then when you switch your theme, be sure the Yoast plugin settings are still primary and your new theme has not overridden anything.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

This answer comes right from Rand himself (and a few other answers), as I just stumbled upon it in Quora yesterday:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-permalink-structure-for-SEO

And to add my two cents, as far as rankings, I don't think you can credit the URL alone for a #1 page ranking. I would construct your URL as Rand suggests and focus your on-page optimization efforts in a holistic manner.

Hi Patrick

Welcome! Thanks for the question. Everyone else pretty much got you in the right track here. The structure is good. Avoid too much redundancies and avoid too many folders (depth).

I'd like to add that I too feel very strongly about NOT indexing tag archives. If a blog is set up how it WordPress intended, you'd have about 5-8 categories, and an infinite amount of tags. You index the categories, as they act as the main buckets of content, but you don't index tags - because you could end up with 500 tags, and have half of them with only one post in them. Then they look an awful lot like a duplicate of the post. Not to mention tag archives are pretty thin, and Google is returning them much less in the SERPs now.

I had a client with 9,000 (yes... NINE THOUSAND) tags indexed. I zapped em all out of the index and his traffic actually went UP. Not entirely sure if it was due to the tags being removed, but it sure as heck didn't hurt traffic.

Feel free to check out my SEO for WordPress post on Moz as I think it covers a lot of the things you may have questions about.

-Dan

Edit: Ohhh I meant to add... noindex your subpages too.

Hi

This on-page site optimization tool has been a huge help as well.  http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

I think you can run it free 3 times if you're not pro.

-Dan

Hi

The Open Site Explorer while exhaustive does not have all the links on the web, plus it won't have the most recent links.

You could also try www.majesticseo.com.

You could use a variety of advanced operators to find some more links;

• -site:www.mydomain.com "mydomain.com"
• -site:www.mydomain.com inanchor:"my site name"

That might catch some more of them.  You can try adjusting the time range to get recent ones.

-Dan

You may want to "niche" down with your target keywords (go a little more long-tail). Neither "wordpress" or "magento development" rank you in the top 200 results, and "small business web design" you're on the 11th page. One option of getting more targeted, would be to target businesses in your area - "Small Business Web Design in Atlanta, GA"

An XML sitemap is not a super critical point (especially for a small site), but certainly highly recommended.

Yes, run a site search (site:treelifedesigns.com) in google, and pick out all the pages you don't want indexed.  Add them to your robot.txt file.

I didn't look at off-page, but there's always link building and social sharing that can boost things a lot as well.

Nice Doug, you bring up a good point and that is to not assume the spammy links are the (only) cause.  I would:

1. Ask your client to stop doing that

2. Comb through Google Webmaster Tools for errors - 80% of the time you'll find what need in there.

3. Do what Doug suggests which is run a check on the site to be sure its not some sort of on page factor - dont forget the often overlooked things; robtos.txt meta robots, xml sitemap etc.

4. And finally what Doug suggests: building quality links to balance out the negative ones is essential.

-Dan

Hi

You can use the Plugin for Chrome - hopefully that's what you were looking for!

-Dan

Hey There

One quick issue I see you need to fix - your homepage can load several ways

aplusmidlandstorage.com

www.aplusmidlandstorage.com

aplusmidlandstorage.com/index.php

www.aplusmidlandstorage.com/index.php

www.aplusmidlandstorage.com/index.html <--goes to "default" main page template from webhost

soooo...

• they all need to redirect to a singular homepage, I recommend www.aplusmidlandstorage.com

• make your internal links point to this singular version of the homepage

• you may want to use a canonical tag just to be safe.

That ought to be a good start

-Dan

PS - also, get your brand name at the end of every title tag and keyword in front (keep to 70 characters or less still)

It is to control the flow of link juice. Since they can not control the questions coming in (order, frequency, topic etc), they chose to only follow the links that are static which appear in the menu on the left. This focuses link juice exactly where they want it. Also, the links within the Q&A's coming in get doubled or tripled up, and this is unnecessary link juice as well. Hope that makes sense and helps!

-Dan

Hi Lehia

Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:

• how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
• I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?

Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.

One last thing!

1. Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
2. Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
3. Export the "Redirect Chain" report
4. And undo any redirect chains

I talk about that a little here.

Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).

Christine

Thanks for providing the site name to me via PM - won't reveal the site here, but I see the issue.

The contact link in your footer should always lead to the contact page;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

However, it is adding the subfolders of whatever directory you are in. If you are on the page

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/

it is linking to;

• http://www.yourdomain.com/your-subfolder/contact/

In which, of course, no contact page exists at that URL.

You need to find where the footer links are being created in your WordPress setup - options are;

• Could be in the theme settings
• Could be in a widget
• Could be "hardcoded" into the footer.php file (although I doubt it)

And see if you can enter the link to the contact page just as an absolute link (not a relative link) explanation on this page

In other words, you want the link in your footer to ALWAYS point at http://www.yourdomain.com/contact/

If this does not fix it, you may need to go into the "editor" and find the footer links in the footer.php file - where you can change the link to reflect the absolute path of the contact page.

If still at a loss, contact the help folks for your WordPress theme, cause this sounds like a theme issue if the mistake isn't on your end, this definitely has nothing to do with Yoast.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Gary

You should have your 301s ready, as you'll want to implement them as soon as the site changes.

A quick way to get all the URLs (new or old) is to spider the site with Screaming Frog or Zenu  - get the URLs in a spreadsheet, and that way you have your list of old/new URLs.  Depending how well you know excel you can get them matched up and ready to go quite easily with very minimal typing.

Then check webmaster tools right away when you may the switch to catch any 404s.  Also, re-spider the site to look for the same.

-Dan

Hi!

Just need to clear things up here, sorry I'm a little late to responding!

1. Quick Fix - Create a description template for tag archives

You're getting duplicate errors because your tag archives all have the same meta description. Use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO for wordpress something for Joomla and create a template for your tag descriptions. This will give each tag archive a unique description and eliminate the duplicate errors.

See screenshot

2. Long Term Fix - Root of The Problem

The real ROOT of the issue, is a combination of maybe a poor theme, no SEO plugin (that I can see) and tag pages being used incorrectly.

• Tags should be completely different than any categories

• And as standard practice I NOINDEX tags. Because there content is so similar to other pages, and it also may not be the best user experience. There may be exceptions to this but its a general rule I follow.

Now, with that said, don't just go deindexing your tag archives.

Tomorrow (May 8th 2012), I have an extensive article going up on the Moz blog about WordPress and duplicate content. I suggest reading that article to get a good understanding of how all the elements work. And perhaps in the long term you can work towards a more robust WordPress setup. But for now, no harm done the way it is.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Edit - Realized they are using Joomla. The same concepts apply, but with a technical implementation that works with Joomla (which I am not as familiar with).

Hi

Few things I saw right off the bat:

• Doing a site: search in Google (site:ignitehats.co.uk) I see LOTS of duplicate meta descriptions, and LOTS of pages that look like empty search results getting indexed.  (like this one)
• Google has 6,000+ pages in the index for the site, but screaming frog only found 700!!

The other answer about backlinks might have merit to it, but none of that's going to help until you get these technical issues fixed.

I would honestly proceed this way;

1. Get a complete site audit done by a professional

2. Make the technical changes needed

3. Fill out then content some more. The site overall is very "thin". Not much text, especially important pages that should carry authority like the home page and category pages.

4. Wait for Google to re-crawl

5. The use this tool to answer the question "why does a site rank where it does?"  Make sure to run the full report.

6. Then work on backlinks.

-Dan

ALSO - your site is loading with AND without the www and /index.html does not redirect.  All possible variations of the homepage should redirect to only one.