[barthard]

Hey there,
I just went through a long process of redoing my website to make it more visually appealing. Obviously I've been keeping SEO in mind when developing. On the second crawl of the new website I seem to have dropped off the face of Google for my targeted search terms. I still rank well in Bing and Yahoo.

Does it normally take a number of crawls before I get re-ranked? Is my onpage SEO really that bad or am I in the sandbox?

I've spent hours and hours re making my website and I really don't want to have to go back to the old.

website is http://www.merlinconstruction.ca

Thx, any thoughts appreciated

 

[JBM]

Site looks ok at first glance. Some on page things could be done better but it looks decent enough.

Look at your GWT and see if there is anything there. Look to see if google sends you traffic to your pages.

your domain was registered in 2010 and has like 25 backlinks or whatever. You wont get sandboxed in this situation.

If it were me I would fine tune page titles (remove company name from the beginning), work on the on page, keep adding pages of good content, blog more with good seo, build additional blogs into lateral areas to expand your brand's reach, build citations.

 

[barthard]

Thx for the feedback JBM. No errors in GWT. I'm going to be working on my on-page for sure including those title tags you mentioned. So frustrating going from bottom of the first page to not even on the 20th.

 

[EthanB]

Hi Bart,

Did you keep your page urls when you did the redesign? Did you entirely rewrite the pages that were ranking on Google?

 

[Tom R]

Not sure exactly what the problem might be, but you should put this code in an .htaccess file and into your root directory . . .

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]


this way the non-www version of your site redirects to the www-version, and your site shows either way.

I guess it's a long-shot, - - but maybe google indexed the non-version???


Edit, - - Oop, - - checked again and it worked for me . . .

 

[barthard]

I knew someone would ask. I kept all the same URLS exactly and redid the site page by page keeping the same link structure. Added a few new pages and redid my sitemap and submitted to GWT.

I'm thinking it could be that I haven't redone my blog and a few landing pages that have broken image links and the layout is kinda messy. I'm getting a few validation errors which probably isn't helping as well. I've also removed the site links in my footer on the homepage to test if i'm being penalized for that.

Not sure exactly what the problem might be, but you should put this code in an .htaccess file and into your root directory . . .

Thanks for looking into it Tom, got that covered. I do have a bunch of other junk in my .htaccess file for the blog i wrote in PHP which i'm switching over to wordpress shortly.

When navigate to http://www.merlinconstruction.ca/(replace this with any word)/index.html it goes to my blog homepage without any content

 

[JBM]

What are the keywords you dropped? And what did they drop to?

 

[Tom R]

Just another longshot here, - - but is it possible to confuse Google with 2 different tracking codes within the same site?? You've got one on the main site and another within the patio (old??) section . . .

 

[carlsore]

For the keywords you are trying to rank for you need to thicken up your website, this is a must. There are also several other items I can see that you need to clean up at first glance.

- you have submitted to some spammy directories where your links are on spammy pages. Ideally you should submit only to trade specific/industry specific directories and ones who carry authority. Look for relevant categories that have little to no other outbound links. You do have a few decent ones, but others not so much.

HotvsNot is probably not the best directory for a landscaper website

- you have repetitive backlinks coming from an SEO forum. I thought you did landscaping?

- your blog is full of broken links and images.

- create more pages IE something Google can rank. Right now you aren't giving them very much.

- fence design = page
- decorative fences = page
- cedar fences = page
- gazebo construction = page
- pressure treated decks = page
- cedar decks = page.

That's only a rough start. Google doesn't rank your website, they rank your content such as pages, posts, images, videos etc... You have a ton of work to do if SEO is seriously your goal.

Carl

 

[BamBamm5144]

Yeah spammy links suck.

 

[JBM]

Spammy links in low numbers will just be ignored. You probably need a few thousand or more spammy links to trigger the sandbox, site ban in the algo, even then at a few thousand links if there are other quality links in there as well they would just be devalued.

People get into trouble when they build "money" keywords with spam then they end up over optimized on anchors. Blizz will remove the authority in spam links but they still take into account the anchor regarding the percentage ratio it seems with the exception of sitewides. They seem to ignore all of the sitewides authority and anchor %.

So if you are having trouble with a specific anchor then check the ratio. I dont remember hearing of anyone saying their site has ever been de indexed for 2,000 stupid links.

Imagine if people could knock eachothers site out of the serps with a simple blast of 2,000 links.

If you started losing ranking around the 10th and onwards of December it was the algo change and not your site. Although it could be your site as well. Pay a pro imo. at least you know it wont be your site going forward.

I would use a different WP theme as well if you insist on doing it yourself.

 

[BamBamm5144]

Oh you mean like 1800 of them?

 

[JBM]

Lol ya that could affect your anchor percentage s

 

[BamBamm5144]

Until Carl took over my site I had no idea. Now the long road of getting rid of all the crummy ones.

 

[Matt-2013]

Hey there,
I just went through a long process of redoing my website to make it more visually appealing. Obviously I've been keeping SEO in mind when developing. On the second crawl of the new website I seem to have dropped off the face of Google for my targeted search terms. I still rank well in Bing and Yahoo.

Does it normally take a number of crawls before I get re-ranked? Is my onpage SEO really that bad or am I in the sandbox?

I've spent hours and hours re making my website and I really don't want to have to go back to the old.

website is http://www.merlinconstruction.ca

Thx, any thoughts appreciated

So a couple of things. It looks like you took a ranking drop around july 2013. This puts us around the penguin 2 update -google's spam algo.

Can a site be affected with a low backlink count. You bet it can. If all the links are exact anchor matches like - la plumbing. You need link diversification.

Some backlink checkers pick up more than others. Seo mozz tends to under-report.

you should be checking your backlinks at least once a month, why? Your competitors might be messing with you. Will you get a warning in webmaster tools? Sometimes, if it's from a algo update, it will happen around the times the algo gets updated. If it's from a manual review, well it can be anytime.

 

[barthard]

Thanks for all your help guys! Been checking the SERPS everyday and we just popped back up basically where we were before.

Last time our page was crawled was the 17th and we popped back up today the 24th. The mystery of Google. :confused1:

I'm going to be taking all of your advice while I continue to SEO the new site, thanks for all the input.