What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?
-
Hello,
I'm really desperate for some help. I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website. I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual. I've lost a load traffic since then. I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected. The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc... I know Panda did not like that.
I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/ and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.)
My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst. Other good ones are slipping too.
I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first.
My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google? I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible.
Thank you in advance!
Here is my site: http://alturl.com/mvmux
-
I have a question for someone about blogs. I have two - one on my website and one at Wordpress. How long are blog posts supposed to be and is it okay to have links pointing from my WP blog to my website? I'm not sure how that looks in the eyes of Panda.
-
Tutu Girl-
I dipped for about 45 days. During that time, I worked night and day posting, blogging, etc. I went and found all our old blog post and relinked them to new urls ( that's the day I realized that 301's would be to much to handle( had 6800 of them at one point)
Cleaning the architecture is more important that anything you can do-( in my very educated opinion ( educated by doing and getting results)
Think about the search engine as ADDHD teenagers- if you give them a reason to get distracted- they will go somewhere else. I also learned a few things for some really smart people. Namely- Jason Dowdell( seotool). He taught me about using Jquery to reduce number of links, placement of content ( no lower than code line 40) as well as a ton of other things.
Basically the lesson that I learned- make the switch. Get the architecture in place, then content, then begin doing seo work then sales will fall into place. Not focusing on the architecture will lead to lack lust performance down the road. Aslo, develop a system for adding content, spinning social and blogging which will also help.
Hope the helps- it's a lot of work but work- but so is opening a retail store( which is what an online store really is( just bigger market of customers)
Chad
-
Chad - how long was your dip?
-
Hey GreatFence-
I own TheGardenGates.com and did a complete replatform ( leaving volusion too) I timed my relaunch at the slowest time and had a dip. I did do 301's but later basically just plug the plug on everything. Then we added an incredible about of content-
the results have been incredible and our sales our up 500% from Volusion.
Good Luck
Chad
-
You are definitely headed down the right path. I know from experience with 3DCart that they have just started offering SEO services. I would advise to steer clear of them. If you've had any experience with their customer service, it's, well, marginal.
I attended their kick-off webinar for their SEO services and they were still talking about populating meta keywords tags. I posted a question asking them when they were going to make it possible to do SEO on their .asp pages [which you currently cannot access at all] and they did not respond. There are similar built-in problems with SEO for their blog.
I would advise hiring an SEO that specializes in E-commerce who has had a lot of experience with 3DCart. I'll still take a look at the site on Monday. There may be a lot of things you can do yourself without the expense of hiring someone.
-
Excellent comments Ryan. I believe part of the challenge here will be working within the confines of 3DCart. I had the same problems with Volusion. These E-Commerce solutions are not necessarily coded with SEO in mind at all. I liked the way Volusion's back end was organized much better than 3DCart's. In 3DCart everything is broken into pieces and not organized very well. Trying to put in javascript for certain additional features can be difficult or impossible because one cannot access the right parts of certain pages (i.e. one cannot directly access the whole code of a product page to place snippets in the ). I've also had several times where javascripts from PowerReviws, Bizrate and AddShopper broke the shopping cart altogether.
If I'd had a choice I would have built my newest e-commerce site in Volusion. However,, Volusion does not have sophistacted enough taxation capabilities and the company had nexus in California, Washington and Idaho. We were forced to choose 3DCart because it was the least expensive option that integrated with Avalara, a 3rd party tax calculation service.
-
Thanks for adding that, Ryan. You offered me great info.
I believe the 404 and 301 redirect errors are corrected for the most part. In regard to the 301 errors, all is fixed except I am still left with redirects to my chat server, view cart links, and "add this" share for my social buttons. Is this something I can block in robots.txt?
I'm also working to adding more content to my site. Basically, I'm trying to do the most possible on the back end of 3dcart with my current design (don't want to move over to Wordpress) before I hire an SEO to help further. I also enabled the mobile device too.
Sincerely,
Angela
-
Dana, I agree with your feedback. In case it helps I will share part of a conversation I had with Angela last week.
Your site is full of coding errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=tutugirl.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0) which may affect a search engine's ability to crawl your site or how the site appears on various devices. There are over 1000 404 errors on your site, over 15k 301 redirects on your site, coding errors, no mobile site, image issues, etc. I am not suggesting your site is not beautiful but the site architecture has so many issues your site rankings and user experience are negatively impacted. I can only guess you designed the site using a template, in which case I would recommend you work with a professional developer on a site redesign. I hate to share bad news with good people but I can only tell you what I see as I examine your site. You offer a beautiful and very cute product which is handmade and clearly has a solid place in the market.
-
Thanks Dana! just emailed you.
-
Hi Great Fence,
I am only speaking from experience. I am not saying there will definitely be a dip. I am saying that anyone who is replatforming, particularly if they are re-writing URLs, they need to be prepared for a dip Perhaps it has to do with changing servers where your site is located (if I was Google, that would be a significant part of the equation).
There are no guarantees for sites one way or the other.
As a SEO who specializes in e-commerce I just want to make people aware that re-platforming might now solve all of your SEO woes overnight. You have to be patient.
Great Fence...if that 3-month dip led to double the traffic and conversions that you had before you re-platformed then it would all be worth it wouldn't it?
Some platforms are definitely better than others, but you need to be prepared to sacrifice a little and wait out the dip. If you've researched your choice well enough and made it taking into consideration your overall business goals, you should be fine.
I know that's not 100% reassuring, but if your business model is solid and your [products are good, you should be okay.
Dana
-
Dana, so are you saying there's no way of getting around a dip when you rebuild a new site on a new platform. For example, my site is currently on an .aspx shared server with a well known company similar to Volusion. However, we are rebuilding the site in pHp MySql via a more powerful open source platform which will be on a dedicated server.
Can't we set redirects within Google webmaster so that there is no "dip." There's got to be a way to minimize "the switch" when we do finally go LIVE later this year so that there is no 3 month (or longer) dip. That's very disturbing.
Have you researched this thoroughly?
-
Hi Angela,
What are you seeing in your Google Webmaster Tools reports? 3dcart does have some unique SEO problems, but nothing that should be affecting you to this extent.
For example, you can't SEO 3DCArt's .asp pages nor can you properly SEO any blog posts.
However, I have a niche site on 3DCart that is doing quite well.
Your site is adorable and clearly unique.
I would be happy to take a look at it if you are willing to grant me view rights to your 3dcart backend I can tell you how to do that if you'd like, No charge. I just really like your site and would love to see you get back to where you were.
Please feel free to private message me or drop me an email at dtan@ccisolutions.com
-
Hi Dana,
Thanks so much for your quick reply! I switched carts on June 15 and 301 redirected old URL to new URL. That part was definitely done correctly.
I moved from wahmshoppes.com to 3dcart.
Here is my sister site that my site USED to be on over at wahmshoppopes.com I've pretty much ignored it and doesn't generate much traffic, but I still keep it running. It shows a perfect example how my old product URLs used to look: http://alturl.com/z2g6w
The scary part is that I'm still dropping down. I know something is terribly wrong and it's so upsetting because my site used to generate so much traffic and pretty much dominated my competition.
Angela
-
First of all, I'd like to say, your sight is completely adorable!
Okay, that being said, I have a lot of experience in E-commerce. What platform were you on and what platform did you change to? Were there any changes is the URLs of your site? Did you do 301-redirects? Do you know for sure those 301-redirects were done properly?
I moved a very large site (5,000 SKUs) from self-hosting to Volusion in 2008. We had good traffic up to that point and then, for the first 3 months after we re-platformed everything tanked. But what happened next was quite remarkable. Our traffic skyrocketed and our conversion rate did the same.
Sites replatforming have to prepare themselves for a major "dip." But what happens after the dip could be really worth it. I know it's scary, but it could be that you are experiencing the "dip."
I am interested to know what e-commerce platform you were on and what you are on now. They allhave their own SEO challenges. I have a lot of experience with Volusion and 3Dcart and some experience with Magento. I'll be interested to know where you were and where you are now. Cheers!
Dana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking #1 in Bing & DuckDuckGo, not at all for Google - where am I going wrong?
According to the Moz rank checking tool, my blog ranks in the top 3 for my name "James Crowley" on Bing, Yahoo (both in the US and UK), and also DuckDuckGo (though Moz can't tell me that). And yet doesn't rank anywhere for Google. I don't have any penalties, and for other keywords it appears fine on Google. Does this seem strange to you? Am I going wrong somewhere? The blog is https://www.jamescrowley.net/. Many thanks James Nq5uF2al.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | james.crowley0 -
Drop in Rankings
UPDATE* I temporarily removed the images from the page to check if rankings would come back and they did. So Google made a recent update in the Netherlands where they look at your page for adult content (pictures). For us it was breast augmentations, before and after pics. END Hey Guys, We have a site for plastic surgery in the Netherlands. We ranked on number 2 if someone searched for breast augmentation. But sinds 31 of januari our ranking dropped outside the top 50. I did not get a warning or an other message in Search Console. We have a lot of pictures on the website displaying before and after pictures. So you see breasts. Does anybody know if google rolled out an update where they look at photo's with audult content? We didnt do any linkbuilding or other black hat stuff. Kind regards, Ruud
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | equipezorgbedrijven0 -
Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch
We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites. The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions). I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites. I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Is site page structure hurting its chances to rank?
I have a client that sells geotextiles and related products. None of his keywords gets a lot of traffic google as it is a very B2B niche specific industry. For instance, and these numbers are off the top of my head The phrase geotextiles may get 80 searches a month and we have a domain.com/geotextiles.php page Then there are woven and nonwoven geotextiles which may get 30 searches a month We too have a domain.com/nonwoven-geotextiles.php and etc It then goes even further and has things like slit film series non woven /woven and we have subpages from there. To me, I feel as if we need to merge all of these pages to just a singular geotextile page with headers for woven and nonwoven and product info for the sub branches of those two. I feel as if we are basically competing for the same phrase again and again and again for very small amounts of traffic. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
PA59 DA51 Yet the site hardly ranks
Hello All, I wonder if you'd kind enough to help with your insights... The site is www.dataclinic.co.uk It's been up and running since 2002 and is a data recovery related site that for years ranked on page 1 for lots of data recovery search terms. Now it's hardly ranking at all, despite decent content and updated blogs. Google (via Webmaster tools) says the site hasn't been penalized for bad links... but we are searching for an explanation as to why it's so difficult to get our once good rankings back.... (For example, the main search term we'd like to rank for is "data recovery"... we are currently on page 8... [google.co.uk search]... why???) Any ideas greatly appreciated... and I'll reply to each of you privately if you wish. Thanks for your time. Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 3Amigos0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071