Drop In Rankings / Traffic... Can you find any technical issues with my site?
-
I haven't spammed the engines, if anything I haven't done enough link building. So let me start here:
I split my old domain www.STbands.com into two separate domains - www.Suddora.com and www.CustomOnIt.com . The main site now goes to Custom On It and each page directly 301 as it was relevant. I knew there was going to be a little blow back...
The first month went fairly well but last week we noticed a dip in organic search traffic and sure enough some of our main keywords are now suffering.
I am wondering if this is because we haven't been building enough links to the new domains or if our new eCommerce CMS (magento enterprise) has technical SEO issues that is giving Google trouble. Nothing on GWT looks terribly wrong, should i be searching for something specific?
Anything helps at this point, we are in dire need of some direction on what could be wrong. Any suggestions?
-
Let me just call this... "logical speculation"....
If you chop a domain's content in half and place it on two different websites, you have also just chopped all of the links, likes, mentions, etc in half.
If you do that you should expect every ranking everywhere to drop - because you now have less domain authority - you cut it in half.
-
I would do a few things in addition to what you have done already (I think the results you are seeing right now really also depend on when you did the switch):
- Introduce a robots.txt and hint it with a Sitemap. If you have not manually submitted a site-map, do this as soon as possible. This will push Google to re-crawl your content.
- Fix your PageSpeed - you are scoring 58/100 which is really bad - see here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121004_PY_42T/
- Although you have RichSnippet product information on your site, it looks wrong - i.e. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.customonit.com%2Fcustom-slap-bands-silicone-bracelet-wristband.html&html=
I would try and fix the above - those are all simple and quick technical fixes. The Sitemap submission is probably the most important aspect and you should monitor the GWMT health and index ratio as well as the crawl rate.
I would then also compare the traffic on your new domains with your old domains. I would look out for change in traffic patterns and change in search terms. Your drop might be related to different copy on the new site.
I personally do find your site, categories and product pages a bit confusing (perhaps I am not your target-market), but it does not quite feel like an eCommerce site, but others might think differently. I am saying this in regards to UI/UX and not onpage SEO.
-
Nakul,
Good point on the brand building the fact is all you need both to move-up in rank right now. I would concentrate on building relevant links from the most relevant authoritative sites you can. I would also focus on adding content strongly recommend that you have a blog to your websites. This will give you an opportunity to add content, a daily basis hopefully at least 4 times a week and get to much-needed attention from Google. I feel the matter what side is almost every site can benefit from a blog or a newsfeed whatever they want to call it basically new content that is relevant and well written. You may want to look into the entire structure of your site I'm not telling you to go nuts but really analyze it looks for small problems fix them then if you want some help with the writing I'd recommend a Word press plug-in that ALSO has a great web interface where you can copy and paste your content prior to posting in your blog or adding pages. It will then using your URL and give you suggestions based on different metrics it is a fantastic piece of software. FYI if you buy a theme I paid roughly 70% less than the advertised price because I purchased one WordPress theme not saying this is going to happen for you however I do know that every time I've put a studio press him up it at least gives me 50% off as a offer software is http://scribecontent.com/
please let me know if I can be of any more help to.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Nakul,
Just sent you a private message.
Paul
-
I would bet you are unfortunately suffering from the latest update in Google's algorithm. Approximately what time last week to this happen? How do you been going about building links can you going to a little but more detail about your methods? Here are your organic standings as of right now for each site. If you are to truly 301 redirect their website it should be to only one other site. You may be getting some blowback by 301 redirecting your site to two websites and not the one site is supposed to be redirecting to as you know it is a permanent redirect meaning the site no longer is here please look at the site not sites. is there a site you prefer over the other? Would strongly recommend linking the 301 redirect only one of those sites. Also I will take your link profile and have a look at it using a few different software's including my favorite SEOmoz however I will get more than one opinion. Have you done this yet? Have you looked for spam malware a bad links pointing to your site?
http://www.semrush.com/info/suddora.com+(by+organic)
http://www.semrush.com/info/www.customonit.com
I hope I can be of help to you I hope this is of help you in some way.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hey Paul. Good to see you here at SEOMoz.
Are you see drop in rankings for your primary head keywords or long tail keywords or both ?
You definitely do need to work on the link building as a continous process. Think of it more as Brand Building.
I also don't see any structural issues with either of your website that would cause any major indexing issues.
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
-
Does Google really using unlinked brand and related mentions as a ranking factor?
Hi Moz community, Seems like Bing already confirmed that they are using link-less mentions for the ranking graph and some SEO experts believe if Google also employing the same in their Algo....Can anybody please confirm and share your thoughts on this? Thanks
Branding | | vtmoz0 -
Reducing Amount of Text on Web Pages-Risk of Killing Ranking?
We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan. Our site (w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com) is text heavy and somewhat uninviting. Ranking is fair. Conversions awful. Our niche is very competitive. We plan on reducing the amount of text and making the site more visual. Among the planned changes: -Reduce amount of text in home page and text heavy pages. More emphasis on product (listings)
Branding | | Kingalan1
-Much larger photos for listings
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts
-Better forms New design will be like: http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/ Theme and graphics based on Manhattan. More visuals. Better photos. Less text. But are we shooting ourselves in the foot by reducing text? Is there a risk that Google will reduce our ranking? Can we compensate for reduced text that is visible to visitors by completing meta tags more fully? Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Alan0 -
Google displays the wrong store hours. Can anyone help lead me to the fix?
When doing the following search on Google "Ticket King Milwaukee hours" we see the wrong hours displayed at the top of the page. Just to the left of our places page, you will see "Tuesday hours 8:30-1:00 pm." That 1 pm closing comes up for every weekday, even though we are open until 6 pm weekdays, and 3 pm on Saturdays. I have checked the hours listed on our G+ page, our "Places for Business" page, our "about us" page on our website, and can't find where they are getting this incorrect data. I even went out and checked most of the "List your business" sites that I have registered with.
Branding | | Ticket_King
I have submitted this to Google, but have not heard back. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can fix this, or at least find out where this bad data is coming from? I did find a company blog post from 2010 that listed our ours in a somewhat confusing way, but it was still correct. (I have since fixed that old post.)0 -
ECommerce Sites: Sub domain vs. Unique Domains
Hello everyone! I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search). Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain. Is this best practice? I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But... What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc. We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly. Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)? Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain. Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward. On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth. That's another problem for another day...
Branding | | brad.s.knutson0 -
Can anyone advice us on how we can improve on our SEO ranking?
Hi, We are the leading home cleaning and maintenance company in Singapore. We are trying our best to go online to expand our business. The thing is we are weak in internet marketing and we need to get some traffic to our website. Can expert advice us on how we can improve on our Google ranking? Our site:
Branding | | chanel27
http://www.absolutesolutions.com.sg0 -
How to get Google to link external review sites in Google Places
Hi, I have several company profiles in Google Places and Google Sites, I also have the same profiles for those companies in review sites like Yelp! and so on. I have seen that other sites have links on the bottom where Google points to those external review sites, but that doesn't happen for me yet, is there a way to tell Google that I have profiles on other review sites so they can link them or is it Google whenever they find them that will link them? Here's an example: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=14126341780178539960&hl=en At the bottom you'll see that it says: Reviews from around the web Now this is one of mine: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=12168877126282825032&hl=en Now how do I get that line at the bottom provided that I know there are reviews out there in other sites? Is there something I can do? Or is it all about Google doing it whenever they see fit? Thank you!
Branding | | tass0 -
Can creating a subfolder and seperate domain blog build external links?
So I am currently going through the creation of a blog with a client that has a company that sells tennis equipment. I have talked to their development team, who is a third-party ecommerce platform, and come up with an idea to create an sub-folder (domain.com/blog) with an article page using their existing framework that would feature full articles in a blog format. Then I would create multiple blogs for them using tumblr and wordpress with their company name and a few with unique names targeted to their niche. These would feature snippets of the content taken from their article page (domain.com/blog) with some responses or reviews on the full articles to further their outreach and then link to the main articles on their article page. These snippets would be divided up amongst the blogs and posted on different days of the week to divide the traffic. Each blog will feature fresh content and focus on a rotating schedule of the latest videos, re-blogs, memes, photos, highlights, scores, upcoming tournament reviews, etc. I will set each one up to rotate through these different topics on different days and times to create a steady stream of traffic. I want to make sure that I stress the fact that I wont be stuffing the unique blogs with links only to the clients company store, I will be making sure to keep it to an amount that isn't spam worthy. Now if these blogs feature rich content including the snippets of the articles from my sub-folder page (domain.com/blog) will these blogs pass link juice to the blog set up on my sub-folder? Also is this a good way to ensure brand awareness and create external links without damaging their reputation? Are there other risks that people have encountered by doing something similar? Please share your experiences so I can make an educated decision.
Branding | | cscoville0 -
Why does Tripadvisor rank higher than official hotel website?
Hello, I am trying to figure out why Tripadvisor is ranking higher for "Royal Lahaina Resort" than our official site RoyalLahaina.com website. Could any of you help here. It is confusing because our RoyalKona.com and our HawaiiHotels.com (Hotel Chain Group) ranks 1st but for one of the hotels it comes in second to trip advisor. Please help!
Branding | | TSpike10