Years of SEO Lost?

12 years ago

Originally Posted by jjsutton79

What are we doing wrong?

Savannah Wedding Planners | Hilton Head Wedding Planners

Sorry to hear that.

In all do honesty... You relied solely on Google, and age ole tale of short term success, IMHO.

Doing SEO related stuff is fine, but to rely solely on rankings with the constant changes Google makes... to me seems a strategy I have avoided like the plague. You should concentrate on social media, targeting audiences through other channels, media, articles, guest blogging, ppc, or email marketing - build a list of prospective buyers... if you lose your rank, you're site won't tank.

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kk075

12 years ago

Originally Posted by art72

Doing SEO related stuff is fine, but to rely solely on rankings with the constant changes Google makes... to me seems a strategy I have avoided like the plague. You should concentrate on social media, targeting audiences through other channels, media, articles, guest blogging, ppc, or email marketing - build a list of prospective buyers... if you lose your rank, you're site won't tank.

This is horrible advice and written from someone who doesn't understand how SEO works. In fact, Google hasn't "changed" at all in the last 15 years...they have made it very clear that the site with the best content should rank 1st in the search engines for any keyword.

All their Panda/Penguin updates have done is punish webmasters who have taken shortcuts and cheated the system, but these people didn't really lose anything anyway...because they never should have ranked off black hat tactics to begin with.

In your specific case, there could be several things wrong. Start by submitting a full sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure all your prior pages are on that index. If they are and you still aren't seeing results, then you need to check your other metrics and make sure you aren't being penalized for spammy links, weak content or poor on-site metrics. Even though Google says you're fine, that doesn't mean much.

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art72

12 years ago

Originally Posted by kk075

This is horrible advice and written from someone who doesn't understand how SEO works. In fact, Google hasn't "changed" at all in the last 15 years...they have made it very clear that the site with the best content should rank 1st in the search engines for any keyword.

All their Panda/Penguin updates have done is punish webmasters who have taken shortcuts and cheated the system, but these people didn't really lose anything anyway...because they never should have ranked off black hat tactics to begin with.

Having a back-up strategy (*as opposed to relying solely on Google is horrible advice?)

How SEO works... did you really just accuse me of not knowing how it works?

I'll tell you "how it works"...

You spend countless hours building credible back-links, writing quality content, being careful to cross your I's and dot your T's doing on-page SEO, and you believe; owning that #1 spot is the Holy Grail of targeted traffic (*which means $$$) and you invest months -even years 'playing by the rules' -only to wake up one day like the OP who's website just vanished from the SERP's!

So, you yourself claim that all they've done is punish blackhat techniques (*which I too commend the removal of garbage on the results pages)... but, you are bordering hypocrisy "IF" you think the average person stands a chance to build a business solely on SEO strategies... for any decent or relevant keyword! - It's a hierarchy, (((hello!!!)))

Even "IF" you had a rat's chance in hell of being or staying #1 for any meaningful keyword, why would you?

To win Google Aprooval? -Or- Build Your Credibility based on What "G" deems worthy of the best content?

Go right ahead, my friend!

You should build your business with the focus on reaching people (*in their natural habitat) by which your product or services are designed to serve.

How is that bad advice?

Now, before I answer that rhetorical question, (which would likely get me banned...) I'm done!

As for the OP, I spent two years ranking my 1st site on page one, only to awaken to the realization, depending exclusively upon that business model (be it your choice) is NOT a productive use of ones time... but to each their own.

(Note: when this thread began, it was posted in the main marketing thread, had it not - my input would've never likely been included)

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kk075

12 years ago

Originally Posted by art72

Having a back-up strategy (*as opposed to relying solely on Google is horrible advice?)

How SEO works... did you really just accuse me of not knowing how it works?

I'll tell you "how it works"...

...I spent two years ranking my 1st site on page one,...

And someone who understands SEO can achieve those same results in a few weeks if the competition isn't heavy.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if it took you two years to hit page one for your main key phrase, then you likely broke one too many rules in the process. And that means you shouldn't be telling people how to replicate your success.

Maybe it would make more sense to try to learn something here?

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HDRider

12 years ago

If you go to Google and type in -
site:weddingsbykristie.com

It says - A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt

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jjsutton79

12 years ago

But when I do a robots.txt test inside my Webmaster Tools in come back with no errors...

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derekwong28 12 years ago

Originally Posted by jjsutton79

But when I do a robots.txt test inside my Webmaster Tools in come back with no errors...

I would take a look at the robots.txt itself to check that there is no command for search engines not to index your site.
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DubDubDubDot

12 years ago

Searching "weddings by kristie" or "savannah wedding planner" shows it.

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writeaway

12 years ago

Your pages are too similar. This is why this message shows:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

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Winning34

12 years ago

I'm not an SEO expert but a few things I noticed:

There's a lot of photographs (without alt text) and not a lot of text. The link to the blog goes to a sub domain on wordpress.com and again it's just a lot of photos without alt text. (nice photos though btw

)

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yukon

Banned 12 years ago

Originally Posted by jjsutton79

Can someone tell me what needs to be done to have Google index our new Wordpress site back up to where we were? We have had a website with mostly pictures for 4+ years and now that we remodeled it we can't seem to get it indexed by Google again... Everything says the website is fine inside our Webmaster Tools control panel. Are there pages that need to be seen by Google that are blocked? What are we doing wrong? It's been a couple weeks and still no indexing by big G.... (weddingsbykristie.com is the website)]

Indexing & ranking pages is two different things, your pages are indexed: site:weddingsbykristie.com

Your on-page SEO doesn't even exist.

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jeffreysloe

12 years ago

Originally Posted by jjsutton79

Can someone tell me what needs to be done to have Google index our new Wordpress site back up to where we were?

JJ,

I would like to get back to the original question about loosing site rank when you changed to a WordPress site, but first my past experience: One of my customers wanted to do the same thing, change to a WP site. I feared a loss of Google rank making that change. We worked hard to get this site ranked for certain keywords, and we did not want to lose years of SEO.

I thought if I could do a 301 redirect for each page that was ranking well, we would not loose too much. Since all pages of the site were product specific, and many ranked well for specific keywords, I had to make sure the WP site would rank just as well. To do that, I found a WP plugin, Redirection https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/.

Each page of the old site was redirected to the new page of the WP site. Why did I go through this extra work? Because the URL's of the pages in WP are totally different than the original site. It may not be too late to try this on your site.

Once I submitted the new sitemap, Google indexed the site, and now all cached pages revert to the new WP pages (URLs). Whether this was the correct procedure or not, this strategy worked out perfectly for this site. However, the robots.txt file for this site does not have a disallow, and the pages do not have meta data for "no index,no follow". As mentioned above by Derek Wong, check your robots.txt, and then check the meta tags of your site.

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jjsutton79

12 years ago

Update: My designer had NoIndex file on all of my website pages. Once that was removed we were indexed almost immediately. We're gaining rank for our keywords now as I continue my SEO efforts. Thanks for the help guys.

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jeffreysloe

12 years ago

Originally Posted by jjsutton79

Update: My designer had NoIndex file on all of my website pages. Once that was removed we were indexed almost immediately. We're gaining rank for our keywords now as I continue my SEO efforts. Thanks for the help guys.

Great to hear that your designer figured it out!

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Dan Brown

12 years ago

Good thing this is all sorted now, probably the reason why when I visited the site I didn't saw all those problems posted above. Good luck on your business and website!

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Dokemion

12 years ago

Glad you manage to solve it. I was about to tell you about the noindex thing.. Anyway, good luck dude...

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