Home page mysteriously not ranking at all
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Hey everyone, I'm baffled by a situation. I started working on www.hushabyephotography.com almost 3 months ago. The first thing I did was changed the address (was previously blog.hushabyephotography.com) and updated all of the links pointing from the old name to the new "www" and used 301 redirects for canonicalization. Have also built some additional links, added content to the site, and performed on-page optimization to rank for the primary key phrase "san diego newborn photography".
But ranking is no where to be found, I searched for the key phrase, and at rank 190 is a random subpage, not even the home page. The listing had also disappeared from Google Places a few weeks ago after the client updated their listing (which I believe was the result of the known Places bug (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap).
I'm at a loss here for ideas, as I've never failed to at least have a site on the radar. There aren't any spam links so I don't think any penalties are the result.
One last thing, it ranks on page 2 in both Bing and Yahoo...
Please help me out Mozzers!!!
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I think you are over emphasizing the keyword – “San Diego Newborn Photographer”. Titles of almost all the individual blog posts start with one or two general words describing the photograph and then followed by the key phrase – “San Diego Newborn Photographer”. Would be great if you can add some varieties here.
And add alt tags against the images [do not focus on keywords solely here; rather you should add descriptive alt tags here]. And create an image sitemap if you do not have one.
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get these out of the index - noindex,follow these pages
http://www.hushabyephotography.com/waiting-for-sissy-san-diego-pregnancy-photographer/img_7876/
Also technical issue here with Gallery code:
A plugin and or robots.txt and Google WMT URL removal requests will help you remove all of these pages you don't want Google to index.
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awesome answer!
I'm actually working on a new home page with much more content to describe the service and pitch. And am trying to get the owner to write articles that provide value to clients/potentials.
Good point on the outbounds... I didn't realize they could be that detrimental.
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You rank for your company name so the site is not penalized at least
Pages with no content is probably the biggest issue - this site needs content big time, sites like this won't rank well in a post panda world. Adding one sentence per page isn't enough
Site needs better targeting/optimization as well
Kill the blogroll links or at least nofollow them, recommend removing them, leaks PR, puts you at risk and takes users off of your site
Lose the footer links makes it look like you're selling links for PR
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I only see 1 link to your site using ahref and opensiteexlorer.com - It looks like you need to get more links
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