SEO's done, 301s in place, old site STILL outranks new site. What to do?
-
Since Sep 2010 I have had a site up with minimal SEO optimization (www.chrisbrushmusic.com). Oct 29, 2012, I launched a new site on a new domain (www.chrisbrushdrums.com) with more content and tons of SEO work behind it. The content of the new site is significantly different from the old site, and I wish to keep the old site around. I have 301's in place for specific URLs on the old site that point to the new site. I have submitted xml sitemaps for the new site. As of now, the old site still outranks the new site (i.e. Google search for "nashville session drummer" and my old site is #9 - my new site is nowhere). What should I do? Thanks.
-
The old site deals primarily with me as a music producer and a mix engineer -- two other things I enjoy doing and make money doing. However, drums are definitely the primary focus of what I do.
I guess I am not opposed to ditching the old site if I could find a way to present my other skills in a way that wasn't branded with drums (doing that might indicate that I wouldn't be as good as a dedicated mix engineer and the like). Would it make sense to design a couple of specialty pages and host them under a subdomain of my current new site?
I guess I am fearful to ditch the old site because it actually does rank in Google. Would I see better results by getting rid of the old site or just 301 redirecting the whole thing?
-
If I was you I'd 301 everything to the new site. Perhaps you could have an archive section for the content you mentioned you want to keep separate? You are competing with yourself, especially with the similarities in the domain name, and I'd guess there might be a duplicate content/keyword targeting overlap somewhere.
How does the focus of the new site differ from your old one? If you think of it from a potential client's point of view, why would they want to visit two websites to find out about you? Might it be useful to? Surely any relevant information should be on the same website?
Unless the sites have a completely different focus, say you were a photographer too, so one site was about that side and the other your drumming, I'd say it's best to have one site.
-
Thanks Paul! Actually, my home page is optimized for "session drummer." I merely used the "nashville session drummer" example simply because it showed in one page of results 1) my competitors (who don't have their sites optimized for "nashville session drummer either"), and 2) my old site showing.
However, your thoughts, especially the reminder about building links with other organizations and about the timeline for expected results, were re-assuring and served as a call to re-focus my efforts.
I am still a bit concerned about whether or not my old site, while displaying information separate and apart from the new site, is hurting my rankings. I read a few frightening snippets online hinting that old sites staying live after a relaunch could be killing search results for the new site. Thoughts?
-
Chris, the new site likely won't rank for "Nashville session drummer" because the site isn't optimised in any way for that phrase. In fact, as far as I can tell, the phrase is never even used on the site? (I used both the built-in search and a custom Google search and neither could find the phrase.)
The closest I can find is on the front page where the term "Nashville-based session drummer" is the closest you get, and it's only used once in the body of the page. The only way you'll rank consistently for that term is if you strongly optimise a full page around just that term - especially since it's your "money" term.
Just using the individual words Nashville, session, and drummer randomly throughout the site isn't going to be nearly enough. You can certainly use variations of those words on the target page to support the term, but if the phrase you need to rank for is "Nashville session drummer" you're going to need to use that exact phrase in the strongest locations on the page - in the page title, the meta-title, the URL, and the strongly written page content, for starters.
That's the on-page part of the battle.
In addition, you're going to need to get other relevant, high-value websites to link to your site, and specifically that page, if you're going to build and maintain rankings for that term. And you'll need at least some of them to link using that specific phrase.
In order to avoid frustration, you need to realize your time horizon for expecting rankings is far too optimistic. A brand new domain/website with no authoritative external links pointing to it is more likely to require months, not weeks, to begin to rank for competitive terms - and then only if the on-page optimization is done and the off-page work is ongoing.
You say in the title of this question that SEO is done - what keyword terms was the site optimised for - and on what specific pages? Search engines don't rank a site, they rank individual pages. So each page should be targeting a specific term or two (if they're closely related). At a quick glance, I'm not seeing that kind of on-page optimisation having been done on the site.
Lastly, just a heads-up. SEO is never "done" - it's an ongoing process because competitors who continue to improve their optimisation will come along and displace you even after you do get ranked.
Paul
-
Thanks for the quick response. My motivation in keeping both sites is that the old site deals with aspects of my career that are still relevant but beyond the focus of the new site. As to the 301s, I did indeed use 301 redirects pointing to the new site from select pages of the old site.
-
Evelyn, keeping in mind that you launched the site end of Oct, you'll have to be patient with the rankings. I would have been very surprised if you new site had started ranking already. The fact that you are keeping both the domains might also make things tricky. Does the new site have any links pointing back to it. You could have done a 301 redirect from the old to the new URL and that might have helped the new site rank faster. What's your motivation to keep both the sites in the index?
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
-
Which SEO Metric is the most Important?
Hello There are many SEO metrics like DA or MozTrust and even Other metrics such as cognitive SEO metric.
Competitive Research | | siteBaNa0 -
What One SEO Metric Would You Choose?
If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be? *I also asked this question on the inbound forms.
Competitive Research | | eyeflow0 -
Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt). I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | tjkirgin0 -
Open Site Explorer Date of Links obtained
Hi is there anyway to compare a competitors profile over two time periods ie, 6 months ago, then today for example. I have the sites within a current campaign, i would like for example to find a competitors back-links they have obtained in the last 6 months. As some of my competitors have 1000s of links to its difficult to see what they have been upto thanks
Competitive Research | | Will_Craig1 -
Excel workbook for SEO?
A while back someone on here posted a really good workbook for analyzing ranking factors for competitors. Unfortunately I lost it, and I am hoping someone might know what i'm talking about and hit me up with a link to it, or perhaps your favourite seo workbook for excel? Thanks!
Competitive Research | | adriandg0 -
What's the best way to make sure a link is worth getting?
I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily. PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it. I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between. Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process? I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise. So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Competitive Research | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Backlinks: Majestic SEO vs. OSE
My apologies if this noob question has already been answered somewhere, but what's the difference between the backlinks reported by Majestic SEO vs. the links reported by OSE. Just curious why the former might report 2,360 external backlinks to a page and the latter might report 949 total links to the same page. Just curious. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | SmartDraw0 -
In Open Site Explorer, what does it mean when a linking page does not contain any reference to the URl entered?
When running Open Site Explorer on a particular URL, I get a list of linking pages. Many of these pages have a high Page Authority. I am assuming that this is a list of pages that presumably link to the URL I entered. First, is this correct? Next, when I click on an entry in the list I don't see any reference to the URL on the page, even viewing the page source. What does this mean and why is the link in the list?
Competitive Research | | jkenyon1