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I would just disavow to be careful. Who wants to keep looking over their shoulder .

I have numerous clients who were at the top of page in the top 3 spots. They all dropped to page 3 or 4 or 2 and now they are number 1 in maps or in the top 3.

Content is great on all these sites. backlinks are high quality and we do not build high quantity, we always focus on quality. the sites have authorship information. trust . we have excellent content written by professionals in the industry for each of the websites.

The sites load super fast. they are very mobile friendly. we have CDN installed. content is organized per topic. all of our citations are setup properly and no duplicates, or missing citations. code is good on the websites. we do not have anchor text links pointing to the site from gust posts or whatever. we have plenty of content. our DA/PA is great.

Audits of the website are great. I've been doing this a long time and ive never been so dumb founded as to what google has done this time.

Or better yet what exactly is wrong with our clients websites today that was working perfectly for the last 5 years.

I really am getting frustrated. im comparing my sites to competitors and everything's better.

Please someone guide me here and tell me what im missing or tell me what you have done to recover from this nonsense.

Yikes I just realized something and let me add onto this story. Maybe this is the issue and cause of the 301 not really taking effect and the new domain almost seeming to start from scratch.

The old domain was lets say for example 123 paper company with a focus on the same topic.  The old design was also updated when we did the 301.

When we switched the domain the client changed addresses (yet again) , changed his business name,  changes his website design and kept the same content.  The content has been updates and modified a little but its pretty much the same.

Since the client made all these changes at once I feel google might be negating the 301 benefits because it feels like the domain was sold and redirected to a new law firm.

what does the community think?

My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen.

My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms.

If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time.

backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version.

Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out.  My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.

Question is how does one target two locations in the same city with the same keyword/service, and then the home page as well.

I have GMB links to my location pages for a south and central location in one large metro city. The home page is having the same keyword.

What would you do in this instance?

For now i removed all instances of keywords located on the location pages. The home page has a totally different topic now.

I did see my rankings jump up a page and we got into the top 5 on gmaps for tons of terms. I am just trying to see if there are any options im missing on best way to setup multiple locations targeting the same city without wasting the home page SEO juice.  Because right now my home page is not ranking for any major terms at all.

Thanks for the responses but the keywords are fictional and jsut an example of my predicament. The business has been around for 27+ years and in google for  about ten. our backlink profile , citations and etc are all very competitive. Clean and concise citations and links.

I will re read what you said. But it sounds like we are on the same page and I do not expect rank well jsut because on page is perfect. What I’m trying to figure out is the best plan for long term success targetfing these highly Competitive terms.

Content is also exceptional and very informational and helpful.

I’m going To review competition again and make spreadsheet of their layout.

I will kepe this updated so that maybe I can help others in the future

Look at how starbucks does theirs in the states. Make it a locatoin info page. Pictures, address, contact info, ratings, reviews, descriton of the area (historical, new, corporate) and anything else like menus, services , valet, and etc.

If they contain anchor text or are obviously trying to game the system by boosting rankings you definitely want to remove them, but you need to have a good eye for these things. just because spam score is high doesn't always mean its spammy. look into why moz thinks its spammy.

Give it the smell and look test. if it looks fishy, then its fishy.

If you only have your citation listed with a www link you don't have much to worry about.

you will be better off doing it at the domain registrar "manage dns" section. if thats not avialable than just set it up under cloud flare to go directly to https for all versions. make sure you update all your urls in your wordpress install.

So i figured out another way. I did a 301 at the registrar level directly to the https. this ensures every version from that domain (http, https, www or non www) all go to the same URL with https without 2 or 3 redirects.

I have a local seo campaign im trying to reconfigure.

Lets say i am a dwi lawyer and i have multiple locations. These are merely examples for cities and keywords.

• Home page is Criminal defense lawyer - this is the term we should be targeting. Maybe i can target the state name, but i am losing so much SEO weight by not leveraging this home page as the main page for this term.
• Then we have a location page in south Boston  that is "S Boston DWI lawyer" as the title tag.
• Then we have another location page north Boston that is "N Boston DWI Lawyer" as the title tag.

I can leave the city name off the home page title tag,  but then what do i do with these pages that are pretty much competing with one another? I know the home page will not rank since none of the locations point to it, and only to a location page.

I was thinking about creating one page with both locations and having both G map listings go directly there, but that doesn't make sense because other locations do not have the same setup. Or choosing the most central location and pointing that to the home page and let the rest have a locations page.

Finally the home page will not rank well for any major  terms. The location page does rank for the fictional south Boston DWI lawyer, but the other listing does not show up. The home page does not show up in the first ten pages either.  One other aspect is that the home page ranks for terms that I am not even targeting.

These pages are all targeted on specific keywords so that they do not overlap or compete, but some pages are the services main outline, but the location pages have their own version.

I have removed all mentions of the same keyword from the home page.  I made a few wchanges about 2 weeks ago and already noticed movement in rankings days later.

delete me this is a duplicate

I am a bit boggled about https to https

we redirected olddomain.com to https://www.newdomain.com, but redirecting https://www.olddomain.com or non-www is not possible. because the certificate does not exist on a level where you are redirecting. only if I setup a new host and add a htaccess file will this work.

What should I do? just redirect the rest and hope for the best?

Ok so its late and i should of done a bit more research before starting.

The new site was built on woocommerce and it looks liek the code is messy and allot of code in the backend is unnecessary and not showing on front end. Yet it shows in code. Something to do with the dynamic plugins that create the home page.

I will turn the home page into a static page via a developer to see if we can fix this issue wit kewyord spamming on our home page and report back some days after this change has been accepted by google.

If anyone has any experiecne wit woocommerce and how to easily fix the home page source without re-doing it into a staitc page pelase let me know. Maybe theres a plugin or a quick fix.

Thank you

I have a situation and would love some options.

We have a site where we sell a product and lets cal it dog collars.  The home page will not rank for its main term.

Renetly the site was redesigned and the Url structure was re-optimized so that it was not so complex. However, we have 500 products and a dozen categories which all include dog collars as keyword. The products are all dog collar singular or collars plural in the url. So lets say ".com/red-dog-collar" and ".com/blue-dog-collar" then ".com/large-dog-collar" and the categoreies like "classic-dog-collars" and etc. So its very hard to not put the word dog collar into every single product because thats what it is.

Whats hapening is that the menu is linking to each of these categories and the home page is linking to a dozen or more products which all include the word dog collar or dog collars in the URL.

The actual text/content is a good ration. But the source code as stated above shows the main term 150 times. Not exact, but phrase match for those adwords gurus out there.

Thus the page does not rank for its terms and instead google is choosing another internal pages which is relevant. Atleast i think thats why the page does not rank for its term, which it once ranked very high against some major competitors.

How on earth do i fix this without removing products and tags and all these links from the home page?

Or should i not worry about this and find another reason why this page is not ranking for the term it should be ranking for.

The backlink profile is not over optmized by the way. Either is internal anchor text links.

Thank you

Thanks fellas for the replies. After a week and a half the rankigns came back and we actually moved up one spot. Essentially i removed 301's that were very old and were giving google 3 jumps to the new page (meaning there were mulitple old pages that redirected in order of history to the newest one). I also 301d all the old pages to the new page. We also re-enabled a page that was the parent directory of this page (this page linked to the page in question)and had about 150 links (orignally 301d to another page).

Thanks

We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here.

The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back

Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page.

We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3.

hope that makese sense.

Oh someone has to have something for me......im freaking out here.

Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?

Thanks to both of you. This all makes sense. We do have an option to opt out of certain sites and feeds like factual and that is what we have done.

If we find duplicates i shall let you know.