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THANK YOU so much for your detailed response and effort! You bring up some important points for me to address. Though I can probably take the time to learn and fix a couple of the issues you pointed out, it's admittedly a very overwhelming situation to have gotten burned twice in the past two years by SEO & marketing companies. Being a wedding bandleader is actually a very time consuming job requiring many hats. I joined MOZ Pro a few months ago and have difficulty even reading through or viewing the intro videos in that the lingo, followup on basic tasks, etc. -there's so much to take in and even set up. I realize my weekly reports don't mean alot if I can't put the time in. For me to take a shot at one of the items you suggested for example: increasing my loading time, which is crucial as you mentioned - sounds like it could get pretty drawn out, and potentially done incorrectly (by me). As SEO practices change frequently, my lack of tech experience is contributing to a downturn of business after several decades, not for lack of effort!

Is there a possibility we could chat by phone, or could you recommend some I could contact? I would like to make a priority list and see if I could hire you, or a referral,  to fix some of the issues you had pointed out, without creating a muddled situation. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity.

Respectfully,

John Harris    [email protected]     [email protected]   781 545 6011

I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com   Rankings remained pretty much non-existent.

I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent.

Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems  (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com  both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue.

I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/  as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty?

As SEO companies far and wide daily try to  persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great.

No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!