Is the Sandbox Real? Need Help!
-
To start, I'm very new at this so I've likely made a ton of mistakes but here is the breakdown of what's happened/what's been done to my site.
I own a wedding photography company which was based in Portland, we decided about six months prior that we wanted to relocate to San Diego. It was too soon to optimize our website for our new town of San Diego so I created a brand new site. It was born around June 2011. It looks just like the old site but all the content is different (different titles, re-uploaded images, text, etc was optimized for San Diego). What may be my pitfall is I imported our blog posts from the old site to the new site and we continued to keep both blogs live (writing the post in one, importing to the other).
San Diego site: http://continuumweddings.com
Old Site (now optimized for LA): http://continuumphotography.com
From there I began link building. I signed up for the SEO Scheduler and began making the changes suggested there. It told me to sign up for Linxboss, and I did it. Other than that, my links have been build naturally and I have quite a few of them, definitely enough to compete with my top competitors.
At one point I was #3 for "San Diego Wedding Photographer" and I stayed there for a couple weeks. Then I began to drop. Now I'm somewhere on page 10.
I've read a lot of articles on here and I know I have a lot of things potentially hurting me. Site age, Duplicate content, etc. I'm just not sure why I dropped (still rank on 1st page in Yahoo & Bing) and what I should do about it. I tend to get overwhelmed and every post I read seems to talk about something new I may have done wrong. I'm willing to put in the time to fix this; I just need to know where my time is best spent.
-
Wow, this is really great advice! I'll get to work on your suggestions ASAP!
-
Melissa,
I took a quick look (please note this is not a truly comprehensive site audit, so it's only going to touch on the most fundamental issues).
When I compare ContinuumPhotography.com and ContinuumWeddings.com I see serious issues. Duplicate content across main site pages (such as your Home page, and main Weddings and Engagements pages) is at the top of the list. Simply taking entire paragraphs of text and changing out the geographic location, or adding a few other words around that is not SEO best practices. You need to have truly unique content.
Main pages linked to from a site's home page also require quality depth of content as well. So for example http://continuumweddings.com/san-diego-wedding-photos is a page linked from the home page yet lacks any depth of content. In fact, the majority of pages linked from each home page have little to no significant unique content at all.
Next issue: When I go to the Weddings page on ContinuumPhotography.com, the page Title is Los Angeles focused, yet rolling over the photos, I see references to Portland, Denver, Mississippi, etc. All of these only dilute the Los Angeles focus, further weakening the already diluted paragraph based content that's essentially a duplicate to the other site's Weddings page.
Given how competitive both the Los Angeles and the San Diego markets are for photography based web sites, extensive on-site unique content optimization is critical.
Having articles listed on http://www.continuumweddings.com/sandiegoweddings/ (such as the Sample Wedding Day Timeline article) have a link like: http://www.continuumweddings.com/sandiegoweddings/tips/wedding-day-timeline-template but in fact clicking on that causes a redirect to http://continuumweddings.com/tips/wedding-timeline is also problematic. Even though the link is set up with a proper redirect command, the original content in the "San Diego" version makes it appear to supposedly be about San Diego, yet it's not.
On top of that, the intro to that article is duplicate content across multiple locations.
Another thing I found is you've got a Google Places listing in San Diego, but you don't seem to have one in Los Angeles, which you should definitely have.
A serious, focused effort needs to take place to build truly unique content across each site you hope to rank for. From there, you need highly relevant, geographic based link campaigns conducted so as to obtain inbound links to each site from other high quality sites in each respective geographic location. But first, the on-site work is vital.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Need help related to SEO ?
Hi, Hope you guys are doing well! I need help from experts, I have a query that "Does google allows SEO for websites related to crypto currency ?" If yes, what is best way to do SEO for crypto currency website ?
Technical SEO | | JessicaThompson0 -
I really need some help with Magento and Duplicate Page Content results I;m getting
Hi, We use Magento for our eCommerce platform and I'm getting a number of duplicate page content results. It mainly concerns the duplicate page content errors for our category pages. Firstly It seems like the product type and filter options highlighted in the picture are causing duplicate page content Also one particularity category is getting a lot from duplicate page content errors , http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-all-products I understand that this category page is using duplicate pages of other category pages so I set this to exclude them from the site map but it looks likes its till being picked up? I've attached the csv file showing these errors as well. - > Any help would be massively appreciated Thanks filter.png moz-tidy-books-uk-crawl_issues-01-OCT-2014.csv
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Need Help With WWW vs. Non-WWW Duplicate Pages
A friend I'm working with at RedChairMarket.com is having duplicate page issues. Among them, both www and non-www URLs are being generated automatically by his software framework, ASP.net mvc 3. How should we go about finding and tackling these duplicates? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrittanyHighland0 -
Do I need a link to my sitemap?
I have a very large sitemap. I submit it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Is there an easy tool to add all keywords I need to seomozpro?
In my website there are 3,300 products. www.theprinterdepo.com. I have about 200 keywords on the seomoz account. Every item has about 5 or more variations of keywords. examples: hp 1320 1320 printer hp 1320 refurbished 1320 hp printer hp laser 1320 and so on. The question is: Is there an easy way to add all the keywords related to my products and all its variations to the seomoz dashboard so I can more easily track them? If not, what do you suggest me to do?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Understanding the actions needed from a Crawl Report
I've just joined SEOMOZ last week and have not even received my first full-crawl yet, but as you know, I do get the re-crawl report. It shows I have 50 301's and 20 rel canonical's. I'm still very confused as to what I'm supposed to fix...And, all the rel canonical's are my sites main pages, so hence I am still equally confused as to what the canonical is doing and how do I properly setup my site. I'm a technical person and can grasp most things fairly quickly, but on this the light bulb is taking a little while longer to fire-up 🙂 If my question wasn't total jibberish and you can help shed some light, I would be forever grateful. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | apmgsmith0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670