Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Pleasure. Keep me posted.

1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? Absolutely. There's no issue with re-using the content, so long as it isn't live in two places simultaneously. I suppose in theory there may be a brief window where it could be considered duplicate before the old site is removed from their index but aside from that, it's fine. **2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? ** Yes. If you're looking to replicate the same structure on the new site and want to use a redirect, your best option is to 301 each page to its new-domain counterpart. This way, if anyone has a link saved anywhere like their favorites, an email etc they'll still hit the right page rather than what appears to be a random website. Some bad news to be weary of: At a quick glance it seems the link profile on that domain is still quite bad. When you use a 301 to point this domain to the new one, you're also pointing ~80-90% of that "value" to the new domain as well. Choose wisely 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? Also yes, in every way.

No problem! I'm not too familiar with secure migrations in WP, but I bet there is some kind of plugin for that.

Hi, Thank you for your response. I did make some slight changes, and that may have been enough to trigger a drop. For tracking I use Moz, AHREFs, SEMRush, and also Google Incognito using a VPN (I'm overly thorough). I like your idea about maximizing the areas I'm ranking well for. In fact, that's what I started doing this past weekend. Really focused on getting every interior page on the first page. Thank you again for your detailed response. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for sharing. This is an interesting case for me. On one hand by writing technical no keyword content he likely drew a lot of technical links to the site due to depth. Links from high authoritative sites like Colleges and Government sites. On the other hand it may have limited appeal to the general population due to the technical nitty gritty, where they just want to know if "X" firm handle said type of cases and what kind of cost is associated with it. But I could also see how more important high profile clients may find the technical stuff more important as cost is less of an issue. All and all this was a good read. Thank you, Don

My advice here is to get a good strong Scotch, a pack of headache tablets and settle in for the night - it sounds like one holy mess! The only thing I can really suggest is to just try and tackle one element at a time. The fact that so much has gone on with the sites, would suggest to me that Google has lost track of where it is all up to. Start at the beginning (wherever that is!) and work through sorting one issue at a time. -Andy

I'm also a big fan of changing the complete domain to HTTPS. Therefore I'm using HSTS response header to enforce this. The great advantage is that the browsers remember that site as HTTPS and skips any redirect you may have to make from HTTP to HTTPS. So might worth looking at this as well. We are using KeyCDN with force SSL feature enabled.

Hey! Yeah it appears you are caught up in the Google waiting game. From my experience with a similar project it will correct itself here in the coming weeks I'm sure. Follow Vic's suggestions and you should be all set! Cheers and good luck!

Go for it!

I totally agree with Ryan. Let sleeping dogs lie

Hi Miriam, Thanks for your reply.  Yext may be overkill for what I want right now, so I'm going to try Moz Local and another, less well known service (LocalSiteSubmit) and see which seems to do the best job of showing me the status quo, and fixing errors and omissions.   Sort of an A/B test for site submit tools.      Looking forward to trying the Moz tool, I have a lot of respect for the entire Moz brand so imagine this will be another solid tool. Appreciate your response!     ~Michael

Hi, thank you. I probably should have specified my question was focused on Organic, not Local.  I think he's doing fine on local, given that his office is in Pasadena. I agree with you 100%.  He needs more reviews for his listing.  Most of his reviews have gone to Avvo, as real criminal defense clients don't want to leave non-anonymous reviews. Thanks again for the excellent feedback.  I appreciate it.

The usual, compile the links, disavow them If you got a manual penalty, submit a reconsideration ASAP. Find some other traffic sources for the mean time while building better links. You can also start with some other domains as backup. There's really no way to protect your site from something like that unless you have a really good brand plus a lot of great links.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm happy to see that my site benefitted from Google refining P3 or that a Panda refresh potentially helped rankings. Either way, it was a great learning experience that resulted in me improving the back link profile while improving the onsite user experience. Thank you again for all your feedback.

I believe its MibuKotaro

Hi there, David has covered some important points already. I wanted to point out that the URL you supplied here (www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/theft-crimes.html) 301 redirects to http://www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com/san-diego-theft-crimes-attorney.html. Are you using the resolving URL to do any link building (although you say the number of inbound links to the crime pages are very low)? If there was an older version of some of these pages and you've gone through recent redirects when moving to Wordpress, those new pages / URLs may have a hard time ranking initially.

Yes, it's possible to be penalised for a single page or single keyword. Your page has mostly  san diego domestic violence lawyer as the anchor text. You might want to stop doing that altogether. I didnt take a look at your competitors though so they might be more SEO, but there's a possibility that you got a minor penalty for that keyword phrase.

MOZ has more metrics and is very detailed, but in terms of freshness and latest links recommend using href and majestic SEO. One more advantage of using href and majestic SEO is that the reports can be downloaded ASAP. Unfortunately for whatever reasons reports by MOZ take more time to download. Whitespark is especially useful in cases of US and UK citations. However for Asia and Africa specific regions, the results are not very good For lead based websites, recommend using wordpress since its free and very user friendly. For e commerce related websites, majento is highly recommended as it is more stable. Sajeet

Looking at OSE, I disagree there there are no spammy links.  Did you see all of those EDU comment links?

Thank you Keri - I suspected that this was the case. It is good to have it confirmed by you.