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If it's part of the business name, I don't see why not. If you go to that site you circled, the name is Boston Village Auto Body & Repair.  I would say that's a fair title.  If your business name was Woody's Shop and you put it in Google as "Woody's Auto Body & Car Repair Shop in Boston" then probably not so good.

You are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are a lot of factors at play:

1. Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall?

2. What was your main source of traffic on the .net site?

3. Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them?

4. Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile?

5. Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc.

Things like domain age, 301s not passing 100% of benefit, etc. will be affecting you but there could be other factors. It's very difficult to diagnose such a problem like this. Your old site had been online since 2008. That's a good amount of site age.

Also, back in September, Archive.org (Wayback Machine) found that your redirect was actually setup as a 302.

When I do a manual crawl myself or header check I see that it's setup as 301 but whatever sent them a 302 may have also been passed onto Google. I would want to check the WMT/Search Console for your site, Analytics and then maybe you'd be a lot closer to having an answer.

Hope that helps some.

It's ok but benchmark your site speed first. Run 3-5 Pingdom site speed tests, then rerun after you blow up your htaccess.  Most hosts can handle 5k but it's good to check so you don't double your load time or anything crazy.

This is basically a duplicate of your other thread where I gave you that code.  Yes, it should block the other pages.  Put that in, fetch in WMT and you should be right.

Also, you can test it before you implement in WMT as well. I tried it on my end and it works.

www.princessbowtique.com, redirected from .net

You'd have to have a lot spammier domain than that to think it could be penalised.  http://www.buycheapviagralevitraanduggbootsonlinefromchristianlaboutin.com would probably not get much love.

http://www.photographypicturesphotosphotographer.com probably would get pinged for spam ...

Otherwise, I think you'd be ok.

I understand client confidentiality - if you want to PM me the link to look at privately, I'd be happy to.

That being said, anchors finally get too high?  Did losing 17k knock them WAY out of whack?  (Anchor on the other links was 18%, now 35% or something?)

"links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites" = this could definitely be the issue as well.  I have a few ideas but hard to tell without knowing just a bit more.

My questions were just the tip of what could be wrong. As I said and Moosa repeated, you are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are way too many factors at play on why you may have lost some organic lately. Competitor improvements, your own site not crawling properly, parameters & duplicate content confusing Google, new site structure loads slower, etc.

There aren't another 3-5 questions we can ask to sort this unfortunately. Someone needs to dig in with your site, analytics, etc. to see what's going on. Exact dates matter (algorithm updates) as do how everything is setup for your redirects and all that. As I said, Archive.org saw your redirect as a 302. That could hurt you. There could just be so many reasons.

I upload disavows to both versions - so I would simply say add it to the www one as well.

(I've submitted a LOT of disavows - this has never been a problem.)

*** Your canonical links are busted. This is probably doing a lot of harm - make this priority #1.**

*** Some of your pages have TWO canonicals as well - and at least one of those is busted in each case, too.  **

• Meta keywords are (usually) a negative ranking factor, especially when repeated or duplicate across many pages. I would suggest removing all (or the vast majority) of these.

• Some pages have two H1 tags and often duplicate H1s.

• You have a parameter "devicelock" that isn't really working the way you would want. You also don't have a robots.txt file telling Google & googlebot mobile which version of each page you want them to index.

• There are broken links all over the site including to pages such as:

http://www.j-26.com/phone/“http://www.j-26.com/contact-us.html”

This problem with quotes is the same one you have in canonicals - major issues there.

PM the URL or post it here so we can take a look. Generally this is a case of:

1. No indexed links yet

2. Duplicate content

3. Robots meta tag or robots.txt

4. Content not actually in the site (iframes, other coding issues)

5. Content in an image/flash/other unreadable or nearly unreadable format.

It seems a bit "wood" heavy but that's just a gut feel. I think your titles could all be written better to incorporate the type of wood & the main phrase together or put the main phrase first and put the type of wood into the "wood galleries" part - either way they could be rewritten to be better for both Google & the users.

The H1s, & "keyword in content" seem pretty straightforward & correct. The fact that wood is in the URLs twice would also give me a bit of concern - but just keep it as natural as you can and you should be fine. This doesn't jump out as an example of "really over-optimised."

Get the demo version of screaming frog, run a crawl and you'll find nearly everything I mentioned above.

Some of your pages lack enough content or unique content for Google to care:

This: http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-specials/ isn't indexed. But then, why would it be?

http://carpetcleanertn.com/carpet-cleaning-spring-hill-tn/ this isn't indexed - but ... yeah.

No content except an image on this either: http://carpetcleanertn.com/gift-certificates/

None at all here: http://carpetcleanertn.com/great-nashville-area/

Your pricing & services page aren't being indexed but that's because they're near-copies of the actual chemdry page. See attachment.

I think if you wrote clean, new copy for the pricing & services page you'd see them get indexed but since they're super-close to the original, Google has chosen to only index one.

vLWyTlO.jpg

Siteliner (Copyscape's big brother) is really great and what we use first (plus I have a bookmarklet for it to make it faster & easy to use.)

Also use Linda's method of taking a bit of content in quotes.  Easiest way to show an ecommerce client how much work they're going to require - take three product descriptions into Google, watch the magic, and explain that would happen across all 15,000 products.

I have to agree with Justian. You seem to have a few things so confused that it may not make sense for us to try to unravel all of them in a short Q&A but start with this:

Not all anchor text is bad, just way spammy & overdone anchor text. If you check a tool like Ahrefs and you're over say 20%, you're in a danger zone. Over 50% you may as well forget it. THAT is bad anchor text.

Not all paid for links are bad - if you can get traffic off a link, pay for it. If you want to be super-SEO friendly, no follow the link.  But it's not bad to have the link if the traffic is good.

Unrelated directories - yes, I would stay away from non-niche pages. But "link directory" isn't bad if you're in the right ones. For instance, Trip Advisor at some level is a directory with links.  I'd still put every single travel client ever on there.

Writing articles can be a great source of links - just don't overdo any one tactic. I had a client who wrote maybe 100 guest blogs in 4 months.  THAT is bad. (Thanks for telling me, by the way! #disavow)

Anyways, just a few thoughts. Make sure you read http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies and http://pointblankseo.com/prioritize-link-opportunities

And if you really want to learn more, Paddy Moogan's Link Building Book.

These things resolve themselves over time. Google (and Moz) have a record of what your site looked like. If they have 100 "pictures" of your pages and they see the www one, well that's new. We'll put that .. oh wait, it's duplicate.

They haven't gone back to see that the one it's a duplicate of is no longer there and is now redirecting. Once the bot crawls the new site entirely, those type of issues go away.

Your rankings should bounce back as soon as Google gets your domain crawled again. In the meantime if you don't have Search Console setup, do that. Go into the section that says Fetch as Google and get them to recrawl your site. Also, if you have a sitemap.xml on your site you can submit a sitemap through Search Console to help them crawl more of your site.

Those two things should get you back on track a bit quicker.

You can't tell with link tools what they've disavowed. Could've cleaned up all the bad & be left with only the good stuff. I know it's not what you want to hear but all you can do is the best you can do for your site.

Correct - just do a cleanup, 301 the domain, and treat the new domain like you would a brand new one (but with more authority.)

Be careful not to do much that is negative in the first (month? 3 months? year) after a 301. It has a lot of authority but not as much (there's no word for it) "native" juice of its own so any bit of spam seems to be accentuated.

Could you be looking at the wrong (www vs non) version of the site?

Did the dev block robots.txt from all bots (or Mozbot) before transfer?

Are you still cached & indexed in Google?

There's also an ongoing issue with some sites as seen here.