New site design to combat the Panda

[autolock]

Hi guys,

For those of you that know me, you will remember my site lost a great deal of traffic from both Panda and Penguin.

To recover from Panda I have rewritten and improved all the content and have taken the opportunity to go for a whole new design (which was well over due).

Site is TheAutoLocksmith dot co dot uk.

Yes... I have taken a long time to act on my loss of traffic, but I feel this has been wise given that not many cases of Penguin recoveries have been cited and I can now learn from what does and does not work without taking an axe to my link profile.

Anyway, this is stage one complete. I will now be addressing Penguin with a more detailed investigation / removal of suspicious links.

Would be great to hear from those that have been helpful in the past and have advised on my traffic loss issues - your opinions of the new design and site structure from an SEO point of view would be very welcomed.

Only just gone live a few hours ago and all seems ok, but If anyone can see any potential problems please do let me know.

URLs have been changed to be improved and have implemented 301's

Thanks for looking.

[DarrenHaye]

Just at a quick glance site looks brilliant mate, light years ahead of the old site.

[autolock]

Just at a quick glance site looks brilliant mate, light years ahead of the old site.

Cheers bud that means a lot! I just hope it goes in the right direction now:-)

[KernelPanic]

your opinions of the new design and site structure from an SEO point of view would be very welcomed.

Site looks fine, nice job. WordPress rocks.

I would get London on my home page title element.

Remember every page of your site is a potential landing page. You have optimized a few pages but do your KW research and get keywords in your title elements on all the pages of the site.

Are you sure you were hit by Penguin? Your links are a bit spammy but overall not that bad.

You are open 24 hours, not sure why anyone would use your email form, regardless I find that keeping the required fields down to a bare minimum increases the chances that people will fill it out.

The site looks great on my Nexus 7 and my iphone. You've done your homework.

Brilliant start.

[autolock]

Site looks fine, nice job. WordPress rocks.

I would get London on my home page title element.

Remember every page of your site is a potential landing page. You have optimized a few pages but do your KW research and get keywords in your title elements on all the pages of the site.

Are you sure you were hit by Penguin? Your links are a bit spammy but overall not that bad.

You are open 24 hours, not sure why anyone would use your email form, regardless I find that keeping the required fields down to a bare minimum increases the chances that people will fill it out.

The site looks great on my Nexus 7 and my iphone. You've done your homework.

Brilliant start.

Good advice, will add London.

Most people call rather than email. But worth having as some people do prefer to email for non urgent enquiries.

Lost 70% traffic bang on panda and penguin dates. Was number one for all my terms inc long tail variations, and fell to bottom of first page for most keywords and page 4 and deeper for a few others.

Unfortunately in my industry most people only click top 3 companies and get quotes and book one of those. So lost a lot of business trough this.

Cheers for taking the time to look, all suggestions really help and taken on board :-)

[Test-ok]

The difference is night and day, Nice job, congrats on the up grade. It's nice when a plan comes together.

[Dr.Marie]

I agree...the site looks great!

[joshz]

Brilliant design! 100x better! Very, VERY nice!

[autolock]

Thanks for all the positive comments guys! Looking forward to seeing what happens when the site gets reindexed.

Will keep you all posted with progress on recovery from my Penguin and Panda issues.

[DarrenHaye]

Thanks for all the positive comments guys! Looking forward to seeing what happens when the site gets reindexed.

Will keep you all posted with progress on recovery from my Penguin and Panda issues.

Have you got a lot of new content?.

I know you had Marie do a review, did she say you were hit by panda?

I would love to see a couple of quality links pointing your way and see what happens.

[Dr.Marie]

If I remember right, this site was a complicated one. I found the post where the OP allowed me to explain what was going on:

Running a new domain next to an old one that had lost ranking

Now, I've looked back at my original report for this site and see that there was a possible Penguin issue AND a possible Panda issue. It was debatable though whether the site was directly affected by Penguin or if it had just lost link juice because sites linking to it were affected. It really looked to me like a Penguin hit site, but it was strange that the OP was still ranking on the first page for his main term (for which he had overused anchor text). Usually Penguin hit sites drop several pages for the search term for which they are hit. I just checked on google.co.uk and see him at #5 for auto locksmith so likely he was not directly hit by Penguin.

In regards to Panda, I believe there was a mild downturn in organic traffic that correlated to two of the known Panda refresh dates.

Now, I like the design of the new site, but Darren is right to ask whether you've changed your content. If you've got the same content then you're still going to have the Panda issues.

The other issue here is the backlink profile. As I mentioned above, I'm not sure if Penguin has directly affected you. If so, you still have all of the same backlinks. ahrefs shows me 179 domains with 298 links all containing followed links containing the anchor text, "auto locksmith". My concern is that even with this lovely new design you may fall victim to Penguin in the future.

Even still...as you are currently ranking well I wouldn't go making major changes. Your site was one of the more difficult ones I have analyzed! Usually it is quite straightforward whether Penguin was at play.

(Keep in mind as I write this that my memory is not 100% on all of the details of your site as I have done a lot of reviews since then.)

[autolock]

Now, I like the design of the new site, but Darren is right to ask whether you've changed your content. If you've got the same content then you're still going to have the Panda issues.

Hi Marie / Darren, thanks for the reply. All the content is new. I have rewritten every page with 100% unique content. (my site was copied by dozens of competitors, and it was me that was penalised by Penda!!).

Its been written in a much more user friendly tone. The old content was never spammy, but was written with ranking in mind. I have decided to write for the user in good English rather than focusing on keyword density and position etc.

Usually Penguin hit sites drop several pages for the search term for which they are hit. I just checked on google.co.uk and see him at #5 for auto locksmith so likely he was not directly hit by Penguin.

Whilst my site has lots of EM anchor links for auto locksmith, this is part of my brand name so might not have been penalised for this.

A couple of other terms dropped from position 1 to page 4, and they had lots of EM anchors links also. I have dropped one page in particular that dropped deep by not 301 directing it. I have now made a new page for this term.

My thought behind this is.....

Correct me if I am wrong here Marie, but from my research it seems Penguin is not site wide and only effects the page being linked to. So if the homepage is not effected you can still rank on new pages from the strength of the domain.

This side show from Ian Howells describes this as a possible recovery tactic. http://www.slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin from slide 13 on is very interesting

[autolock]

I would get London on my home page title element.

Hi KP, I have a specific page on my site for London, TheAutoLocksmith dot co dot uk/city/car-locksmith-london/

On my old site I had a similar page that ranked well for my service in London. Would you still advise putting on the home page title as well?

Remember every page of your site is a potential landing page. You have optimized a few pages but do your KW research and get keywords in your title elements on all the pages of the site.

I believe I have optimised every page, with keywords in every title, have you seen some I have missed?

[DarrenHaye]

If not the homepage you might think about targeting london for the main page of "auto-locksmiths-areas/" since it's in the main navigation and will be a stronger page.

[Test-ok]

You home page is targeting:
Auto Locksmiths | car key experts you can trust | The Auto Locksmith

I would use 4 or 5 of the best locations along with Auto Locksmiths in the title.
even though you have a specific page for each local.

No one is going to search for "car key experts you can trust"
that's just a waste of good title space.