Please Please Please help (not ranking any more)..

[SinaKashani]

my website is: www.tcclinic.com

it was a static website which was ranking well. total about 400 pages.

I also had my blog hosted on another domain (www.shopify.com) about 800 pages.

I was told if I bring the blog to my domain, then I will have more content on my site and will rank even better, and also was advised to switch to WordPress. so about two weeks ago I did the following changes:

I moved the site and blogs to my domain (tcclinic.com). and switch to WordPress. total of 1200 pages

Since it was changing to WordPress all the URLs was changed and named differently.

I did 301 redirect for all the pages.

all the URLs now contains "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" which is the name of my clinic

example:

www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-liposuction-surgery/

www.tcclinic.com/toronto-cosmetic-clinic-tummy-tuck/

most of my pages are indexed by google now BUT

Now as the result I am not ranking anywhere in first 5 to 6 pages. I am not sure what is happening.

have I been hit by a penguin, panda or any other black and white animal ? if this is the case how do I know this happened.

Haveing "toronto-cosmetic-clinic" in all the URLs is considered as keyword stuffing ?

moving 800 pages of blog to my domain caused it ? (blogs are removed from shopify.com)

Is it just the matter of time to come back to the first page?

Please let me know what you think....

Thank you

[SinaKashani]

Hi Jane,I think now I know why my ranking has been affected.yesterday I noticed a message on my Google webmaster tools under "Manual Actions" which says:---------------------------------------------------------------Partial matchesSome manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or linksReasonUnnatural links to your site-impacts linksGoogle has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.----------------------------------------------------------------then there is a button for "Request A Review"1- How do I know when did I received this message (there is no email from Google) ?2- How can I fined out what links they are talking about ?3- Is that the main reason that my ranking is dropping ?Thank youSina

[SinaKashani]

Can I have your email please

[email protected]

[JaneCopland]

Hi Sina,

Sorry to have gotten your name wrong!

It looks like Google does not always send this sort of notification through Webmaster Tools. See Matt Cutts' tweet from 2012. This tweet was in response to a lot of speculation in March 2012 that notifications were being sent about Panda.

When we see notifications, they are usually about "spam", which also usually means link-based issues rather than on-page problems.

I would still suggest that on-page clean up will help a lot here, but also that you will need to wait for Google to de-index the old content.

Cheers,

Jane

[SinaKashani]

Hi Jane,

Thank you for your detail answer.

but if I was affected by Panda, shouldn't I get a message from Google on my webmaster tools ?

BTW my name is Sina

[JaneCopland]

Hi Behnaz,

bstone81 is correct about it taking a long time for Google to re-index so many 301ed URLs - has the issue improved at all in the last week?

If you search for snippets of content from your blog posts, are the new URLs on tcclinic.com showing up, or is the content still indexed under the old Shopify URLs? I've run a couple of these and I see them indexed in the two locations. Please see the following screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/fvawU9L.png.

The Shopify URLs return 404s (http://tcc-e-store.myshopify.com/blogs/news/11632829-luxe-diamond-foundation) - it's not guaranteed how long Google will take to re-crawl these pages and acknowledge that they are gone. Unfortunately, you can't 301 redirect them to speed up the process.

Unfortunately, some of these pages do NOT return a 404, even though your content is gone. See this example (the redirect plugin is from my former agency, and shows the headers the page returns and if there are any redirects):

Indexed content: http://i.imgur.com/QHSAnlR.png

Shopify's page, returning a 200 OK response but no content: http://i.imgur.com/TT9ZehC.png

Several post pages do return a proper 404 though: http://i.imgur.com/L30npnv.png

As Google says here, the best way to remove content is for the URL to return a 404 or 410 server response: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/64033?hl=en

That page also says that outdated pages not returning 404s will drop out if people stop linking to them. Try to change any and all old links that might point to the Shopify blog to your new URLs.

You also have issues with multiple versions of your content being indexed on many URLs within your main domain: http://i.imgur.com/Z7Hzz37.png

For this, you're going to want to look at pagination options. This post from my former colleague at Ayima is a really good one on this subject: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html. It was highly recommended in the SEO world (Rand seemed to like it, tweeted it, etc.) and it should be useful for this issue.

You also have issues with an expired security certificate, which is returning this error if you try to access HTTPS URLs on the site. Quite a few HTTPS, as opposed to non-secure HTTP URLs, are indexed: http://i.imgur.com/ADX9hBc.png

This should be fixed, and HTTPS URLs should be 301ed to HTTP URLs where the URL does not need to be secure. Here is an example of both versions of the URLs being indexed for the same content: http://i.imgur.com/A7VkACx.png

There is quite a lot of housekeeping to be done on the site to perfect its on-page optimisation, and this will certainly help. There's a chance you are affected by Panda because of this: Google thinks you have duplicated content from the old Shopify blog, and content is duplicated throughout the site in its eyes.

I hope this helps - I know it's a lot of work to clean up the site internally but it's definitely necessary.

Cheers,

Jane

[tdawson09]

The fact that you have all new URL's, even though you have 301'd all your old URL's, it will take Google time to crawl, index and rank those new URL's. It is like a whole new website, and is not currently in Google's database.

You might try going into Google Webmaster Tools, under the Crawl section, and then Fetch as Google. When it is Fetched, click on the Submit to index button, and then click the box "URL and all linked pages". It may speed up the process of Google re-indexing, but is no guarantee.

I have had to do this on numerous sites where I wanted to change to different URL structures.