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This has been a theme since Aug 1st. People are Yo-yoing around. I watched a site go to 8th page to 2nd back to 8th and finally crawled its was back to the 2nd. I would wait a week or so and let everything cool down. I have been extremely perplexed by the recent algo updates. I am hoping for some predictability as well in the future. What I do see as a trend is sites with a lot of backlinks from a poor quality site ( Such as SEO by Company X ) are getting hit hard. Seeing a lot less backlinks from high authority sites ranking sites very well.

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?

Hi Waquid! Thank you so much for adding a bit more context to your question. I perfectly see your scenario now. So, if a business does something like landscape design and has only two offices in San Francisco, it's likely that the homepage and both location landing pages will include references to "San Francisco" and "Landscape Design". The landing pages could also be optimized for hyperlocal terms like "North Beach" or "Glen Park" if they are in different neighborhoods. However, if the business has, lets say, 20 offices in California, then they wouldn't be likely to use any city or neighborhood terms on the homepage because there are simply too many cities to cover. Rather, the homepage might reference regional names, like SF Bay Area, or Central Valley or Orange County, etc, or even just Northern California/Southern California. If the service is identical at all locations, then there's really no avoiding using those service keywords on all pages. You can vary them in any way that keyword research shows you variants. For example, you could dice up findings like "sustainable landscape design, native landscape design, commercial landscape design" etc, between the pages, but if you have just one overarching service, then it will be reflected on all pages. It's the geo-terms that need to be parsed up to fit the scenario of your various offices.

Hi, That is Moz's support. Regards

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.

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

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

Hmm, yeah this is not the best position you want to be in. I would make sure that your Web site is listed in both Google Webmaster Tools as Bing Webmaster Tools. If you already are I would also really submit my sitemaps like 20 times to be sure that Google is aware that your pages need to be recrawled again in the hope that they then also will index them again and hope they will put them back on their old positions.

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.

Yup i just checked again and its definitely been hit. I also have some clients who are ranking very well and they are on this directory, however we are not seeing a negative effect.

Hi Waqid This is a tricky one I think because the general consensus is that the best place to have a blog for SEO is at yourdomain.com/blog, i.e. a sub-folder on your website (and not preferably blog.yourdomain.com). But if you already have an external blog running, then that raises the question how can you move it and move all of your link equity, making sure that everything is 301 redirected at the old blog location to the your website? Wordpress do offer a guided transfer service which you can read more about here. In addition, they can provide a site redirect option - details here, but I am not sure if that gives you 301 redirects or not. Perhaps someone could confirm on that. The thing is, even if it does, then you will lose some link equity with 301 redirects - probably around 5-10% on average. So, I guess the decision needs to be based on how many blog articles there are to move and how many point back to your client's domain. If not many, then I would just move them, but if a lot, it may be best to leave them. Going forward however, I would recommend that you do set up a blog for them on their site so that all new blogging is in what I believe will be the best place for it. I hope that helps, Peter

You are very welcome, Waqid!

Looks like they are still ranking. This is a very odd tactic. Waiting on any input .

Thanks for the info Adam and Kevin.  Thomas, thanks for the removeem suggestion, I hadn't heard of that tool before but it looks great.

It is, but then again, that is what you're trying to do, whether it's through JS or the nofollow attribute. Matt Cutts recommends letting PageRank flow freely around the website, and only nofollow links that don't make sense for the search engine to crawl, like a login page or the shopping cart. I would go with that since, as Eric Enge points out, they probably filter stuff like navigation and footer links anyway.

Thanks

This is a tough situation. I tend to agree with Ricky - these are exactly the kinds of pages that have been hit by Panda, and there's real risk. In the old days, the biggest risk was that the pages would just stop getting traffic. Now, the impact could hit the rest of the site as well, and it's a lot more dangerous. The problem is that it's working for now, and you're asking them to give up traffic in the short-term to avoid losing it in the long-term. Again, I think the long-term risk is serious (and it's not that easy to recover from), but the short-term pain to the client is very real. What's the scope of the 300 pages compared to the rest of the site (are we talking a 400 page site or a 40,000 page site)? How many of these city pages are getting real traffic? My best alternative solution is to pin down the 10-20% of the city pages getting most of the traffic, temporarily NOINDEX the rest, and then beef up those well-trafficked city pages with unique content (so, maybe you're talking about 30 pages). Then, build out from there. Give these pages real value - it's not only good for SEO, but it will probably improve conversion, too. The other problem with pages that just swap out a city is that they're often low quality - they may draw traffic in, but then have high bounce rates and low conversion. If you can show that you can improve the value, even with some traffic loss, it's easier to win this fight.

Thanks for the thought. I'm going to give it a try, didn't think about that. Nothing special about our 301's.

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