OK, I am at my wits end. It seems that new pages I am creating on my site are no longer getting indexed by google. Granted, I am backed up, and the only link I am placing to them is from our home page. BUT, this used to work fine in the past as many are not competitive keywords. I know I have a bunch of mistakes, so feel free to rip into it. I don't mind constructive criticism at all. I welcome it. I just want to make my site better. OK, we are trying to rank well for local search results for notaries public. My site is: www.notaryone.net As you can see on the homepage, (scroll down), I have many internal pages for specific cities in the US. These pages are no longer ranking well at at all, as of about 3-4 weeks ago. I'd truly appreciate some advice, and like I said, 20 Gold Stars to for the best response, and probably a SEO consulting contract (only if your advice is good! I'm serious about the contract though, we need some long term help. Not link building help....more just advice and strategy needed...I have the labor). Thanks!
Also, I have a forum that has results showing in the supplemental index for the majority of posts. Could this be because it is set up on a subdomain, and some of the post are indexed under the subdomain, and some from the folder?
No one? This could be a $$$/mo contract, I'm seriously looking for long term, monthly advice here, and am willing to pay for it...
My opinion? Google thinks you're spamming them. You have the word "Notary" about ... 12,000,000 times? And I have to ask - is that home page text or do you at least have a database behind it? From a human perspective, BTW, that site has to be the most difficult to use that I have ever seen. You know what it reminds me of? It makes me say "Geez, if Amazon.com listed all of their books on one page like that they'd never sell anything." You cannot really expect any one to go through that, can you? Here's a rule of thumb I use when designing sites: If you cannot remember over 90% of the content on your home page, you've probably got a bad page. If I were you, I would let people select their state from a drop-down, then show the list of cities on a database-generated page. From there, they can see what's up. The Google map? Yeah, that's gotta go. You should link to the map when they click on city or state, but not the entire USA! Your home page takes over 15 seconds to load, which 90% of people won't wait for. Your home page should load in 1-3 seconds TOPS. In fact, ALL of your pages load slow. You have no navigation structure anywhere visible when the page loads. And it completely disappears when I click onto a notary listing. Come on ... mystery navigation? RSS include is including stuff that has nothing to do with anything, and that's your main content... not so hot if you ask me. I would have to say that I think your entire site needs a lot of work. Over all I give it a D- if not an F. You really should go learn about usability, and Jakob Neilson is the pro, go read his site: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html Yes, I do web design, and I would be happy to help you redesign the site, but I'm pricey. Feel free to PM me if you'd like a free 15 minute phone consultation.
Thank you very much for your comments. The page has evolved (or rather devolved) over time. If I do a complete redesign, I will still keep all my link power, correct? (sorry, I'm a sales guy, and our webmaster (unfortunately) gotta love a small business).
I'd say a redesign would be helpful, even if its not a complete redesign.. you won't lose any link power if proper redirects are put in place. Mostly your problem is navigation, its not easy to navigate throughout your site. On your internal pages users will want to change their selections or go to a completely new part of your site. I disagree with OneWebAve, drop down menus are decent but generally not the best way to display a lot of information like we have here. I'd go with a directory like navigation on the left side and header link menu that points to your important sections. You should also have a bread crumb system in place IE: Home Page > Oregon > Salem Notaries. One thing is for sure, take the map off of the home page. If you think people will use it often then put it onto its own "Map Page".
For the life of me I can't figure out how to add content to the right side of the page...I know it has sometime to do with my tables... thanks!