Alan Robinson Painting: why the site doesn't rank

On searches that clearly map to one page, 44% of impressions (537 of 1,224, last 28 days) land on a different page. City hubs beat the page built for the job, and city pages beat the main service pages.

City hubs and main service pages are linked from all 107 pages. The 30 city-plus-service pages get 10–20 internal links each, and /nashville-tn/interior-painting/ gets 12. Google last crawled that page on 22 Aug. The pages meant to win "interior painter Brentwood" are the weakest pages on the site.

The homepage ("Nashville House Painters") and /nashville-tn/ ("House Painters in Nashville, TN") target one search. So do /interior-painting/ and /nashville-tn/interior-painting/, and the same goes for each service. Three layers (main service, city hub, city plus service) share limited authority. Nashville searches sit at positions 50–90 on both sets of pages.

This is the main gap. Competitors with thinner pages outrank the site because more stands behind them. Not in the top 50 for "house painters Nashville":

Clean links: followed, spam score under 40, not press-release copies. Link dates are when the crawler first saw them.

Only 2 linking sites were seen before 2026, against 10–433 for competitors. Name searches are 40 a month against about 70 for businesses Google shows. Moz (7) and Semrush (2) are low because the profile is new and thin. A few sites with fewer clean links still rank, so links aren't the whole story; age and the core update are also in play.

Top-pages figures are medians. Alan's Brentwood and Franklin appearances are his city pages, and Bellevue is his homepage. On-page rows compare homepages, not always the page that ranks. The Bellevue search is "house painters bellevue" from Nashville, since Bellevue has no location setting of its own.

Alan's homepage leads theirs on content in all four markets, and he trails on outside recognition in all four. In Bellevue, his home area, the website sits around position 33–48 even though the profile is #1 in Maps. In a separate check of "house painters Bellevue TN", the website wasn't on the first page, but a mystrikingly.com page titled "10 Best Interior Painters in Bellevue", which names Alan, showed at #11.

Google's update ran 21 May to 2 Jun. The site was improving until then and slid from 3 June.

May is non-brand and October is all queries, so treat this as a guide. City pages lost ground and most main service pages held or gained. My read: a young domain with 36 long, same-shaped location pages isn't being trusted for towns it isn't based in. That's an interpretation. Our 55-search data doesn't show that city-page uniqueness matters either way, so test this before changing everything.

Registered 6 Jun 2025. The median site in the top 10 across our 55 searches is 13 years old, and older sites beat younger ones 57 times in 100 at equal authority. The business dates to 2007, but Google has only 17 months of this domain to judge.

Around 10–14 Sep 2025 Google stopped supporting the &num=100 parameter, and many sites lost desktop impressions while average position "improved". This site shows that pattern: average position on non-hack pages went from about 43 to 16 between 10 and 12 Sep.

That doesn't explain everything. Comparing 15 Aug–8 Sep with 20 Sep–14 Oct, real pages went from 2,324 impressions to 13. Desktop fell from 1,146 to 1, which fits the change, but mobile also fell from 1,172 to 12, and that change mostly affected desktop. So some of the loss looks real, happening while spam pages were still ranking around position 8. The data can't show whether the hack caused it. By February–March 2026, the homepage was the only page with impressions, until the new site launched.

117 of the 198 linking sites are copies of one press release, all nofollow, on sites like lifestyle.loopbiz.com. Paid-looking listicles and profiles add more (aimention.bcz.com, theomnibuzz.com, mystrikingly, mataroa.blog). Position went from 56 in September to 63 afterward, so the burst didn't help. The 36 "PBN backlinks" sites are automated noise every site gets, and spam levels match competitors, so disavowing won't change much.

The brand review found the same pattern beyond links: October "Top 5" and "Top 12" articles on LinkedIn Pulse by unrelated authors, a Tumblr list, scripted Instagram reels naming the business #1 (one captioned for Richmond, VA), and Slides.com decks. Copies of the site also sit at alanrobinsonpainting.webflow.io and tan-heron-t2nt83.mystrikingly.com. None of this can be shown to be holding rankings down, but none of it has helped, and it's the wrong story to tell around 82 real five-star reviews.

Across all 399 points the business is top 3 at 109 (27%), top 10 at 301 (75%), and outside the top 20 at 20, of which 16 are exterior searches. Interior is the strongest search and exterior the weakest. It's weakest to the east, toward the city: 3 or more miles out, only 4 of 87 eastern points reach the top 3, against 20 of 87 to the west.

By Sylvan Park and Green Hills, about 6 miles out, the business has dropped out of view. A separate center-of-city check found it at #9 from West Nashville and missing from all 72 results downtown. The office is about 10 miles from downtown, and no listing work changes that distance. The goal is to push the edge out a mile or two and reach the city through organic search.

Out of 399 searches on this grid, which is centered on Alan's office and favors him.

The most visible business has 23 reviews, and its map pin sits north of downtown, about 11 miles from Alan's office. Google also shows a second Affordable Painting Plus listing with the same phone number and 1 review, with a pin next to the first. That's unusual and worth checking, though it doesn't prove anything is wrong. More reviews are still worth having, but Alan's 82 aren't what's keeping him out of the city: he already matches Paint EZ's 432 on top 3 spots here.

It's claimed, with 82 of 82 reviews at five stars, 1,747 photos, and hours (Mon–Sat, 7–5) matching the site. The primary category is Painter, with Contractor, Deck builder, Fence contractor and Painting as additional categories.

• Deck builder and Fence contractor: the site offers staining and sealing, not building. Keep these only if he does that work.
• Unsourced claims in the description: "#1 Local Choice" and "Nashville's Most Trusted Brush". Name a source or remove them.
• Office address: it shows suite #203. If customers can't visit during posted hours, Google's rules call for a hidden-address service-area listing. The license certificate lists a different address (see Part 5). Confirm this before changing anything, since a change can affect the listing.
• Review topics: Google's top topics are "attention to detail" (15), "fair pricing" (8) and "easy process" (5). Cabinets, exteriors and towns outside Bellevue don't appear, so ask customers to say what was painted and where, in their own words.

In the last 28 days about 32 clicks came in, 15 through the profile link and 12 to the homepage. Impression counts look inflated: 77–93% of non-brand impressions are desktop, and many #1 profile searches have no clicks, which suggests rank-tracking tools.

A dormant account with 8,104 followers and an active one with 96 sit side by side in the rankings, so more posting won't move rank by itself. Alan's Instagram is in the normal range but posts less often than most: 12 posts over five and a half months, against 12 in about two weeks for Those Guys and New Direction.

The clearest gap is YouTube. The channel is linked from every page, but no videos came back. Nashville House Painters has 45, including how-to videos with 112K and 39K views. If the channel really is empty, either fill it with real project videos or stop linking it. Short project walkthroughs suit the artist story, and they can also feed the profile and the town pages.

Instagram only shows the latest 12 posts to logged-out visitors, so total post counts aren't available. Dates come from each post's ID. Facebook and TikTok activity can't be measured with these tools. Check the YouTube channel by hand, since "0 found" could be a tool miss.

• 109 URLs fetched 4 ways: as a browser, as Googlebot, as a visitor arriving from Google, and in Japanese from Google Japan. All matched, apart from 2 network timeouts on the Japanese fetch. No cloaking.
• Every sitewide script read: Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Pixel, Microsoft Clarity, Cloudflare analytics, and the site's own menu, gallery, tracking and lead-form code. Forms post to the site's own /intake.
• No obfuscated code: no eval, encoded payloads or injected redirects. The only JavaScript redirect sends the careers form to its thank-you page.
• No hidden links or spam text: hidden elements are just the menus, iframes are Google Maps, and no Japanese text appears.
• Hack URLs are dead: sampled spam URLs return 410, 178 of 182 archived URLs are gone, and no hack pages appear in Search Console's last 28 days.

The hack was large: at least 137 spam sitemaps of 2,500 URLs each in August 2025, and at least 905 spam pages got impressions. Spam pages kept appearing until about 15 Oct 2025, then dropped to 2 impressions over the next 6 weeks.

Leftovers to clean up

• Two Google verification records in DNS. Hackers sometimes add their own. Check Settings → Users and permissions, and remove any owner nobody recognizes. This is the one item worth checking today.
• Old DNS records: mail, ftp and autodiscover point through Cloudflare and return a 520 error. Remove them if they're unused.
• Old hosting traces: certificates show the domain once sat on shared cPanel hosting (apm-online.com, patrickasmith.com), and SPF still allows an old mail host. Confirm the old account and its files are deleted, and tighten SPF.
• Internal notes in the HTML: build comments are public in the page source. They're harmless but worth stripping.

From outside I can't see Cloudflare Workers or firewall rules, or anything keyed to Google's real IP addresses. To close that gap, use URL Inspection → View crawled page on the homepage and compare it to the live page.

This week

1. Check Search Console: Manual Actions, Security Issues, and Users and permissions. A sitewide manual action looks unlikely given the brand ranking, but only a person can confirm it.
2. Stop paid links, press releases, listicles and profile blasts. Find out what's still scheduled.
3. Fix the sitemap: Google lists sitemap-index.xml and sitemap-0.xml, which now 404. Submit /sitemap.xml.
4. Add redirects: 301 /fence-stain-seal/ and /deck-stain-seal/ to their current pages.
5. Check the license and compliance items in Part 5: confirm the license on verify.tn.gov, resolve the two addresses, check EPA lead-safe status, and check whether any job reaches $25,000.
6. Fix what's wrong in public: review counts, tenure, the Pinterest link, the stray phone numbers, and unsourced "#1" claims on the profile and social.

Next 3 months: authority

1. Earn real local links. Overbrook, the Franklin Nutcracker, Heart of Mary House and the Catholic Business League should each link from their sponsor pages. Aim for 20–30 clean local links at a natural pace.
2. Build name searches and mentions: trucks, yard signs, local press. 40 searches a month against about 70.
3. Keep reviews steady, starting with the 117 Nextdoor recommenders, and ask customers to say what was painted and in which town. 82 against about 150 for winners. This mainly helps Maps, and it won't overcome distance on its own.
4. Target the Maps edge first: Belle Meade, Sylvan Park and Green Hills. Real local projects, links and reviews there can push the top 3 out a mile or two.
5. Take down or redirect the webflow.io and mystrikingly copies of the site, including the mystrikingly "10 Best" blog pages.
6. Build web mentions: 24 against 79–221 for the top pages. Named coverage of the artist story in local press and community sites does more here than directories.
7. Check the YouTube channel, then fill it with real project videos or remove the link.

Next 3 months: page structure

1. Give each search one page. Decide which page owns "house painters Nashville" and each service, and have the others link to it.
2. Point links at the city-plus-service pages from project pages, guides and reviews in that town. Projects already exist for this.
3. Test the city layer. Pick 1–2 outer towns, merge their 5 service pages into the hub, keep the rest as a control, and compare after the next core update.

Stop doing

• Adding words, keywords, city mentions, schema or more location pages.
• Chasing spam score or expanding the disavow file.

Judge progress at the next one or two core updates, using non-brand position (excluding the profile link) and real leads.