Rankings Tanked After Redesign
-
This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience.
Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure.
Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms.
I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible.
Now I have no idea where to even begin. Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%!
Any insight is very, very much appreciated.
-
Thanks @iPullRank. There are so many moving parts here and we have decided it is just beyond our understanding to get this fixed. We've decided to work with the folks at Portent Interactive to start a long term fix. Thank you, everyone, for your feedback and assistance. If there is one thing I've learned it's that we need to be working with trustworthy folks like those within the Moz community.
-
Hey Josh,
I'm leery of the "301 redirect add-on" and that would be the first thing that I double-check. I'd pull all of the links that you guys have run all the link targets through a web crawler such as Screaming Frog to make sure that they aren't your 404s. My main concern is that your link equity has not been maintained.
I'd also look at the quality of the links as was mentioned later in this thread, then I'd start looking at whether your content is what we'd consider thin.
There's a lot of moving parts here, but without more information on the site I can't give you a more definitive answer.
-
well apparently it did end up hurting. There are ways to make it optimized for keywords while still retaining it's humanity. An SEO person would/should be good at this. If you want to learn and do it yourself, you totally can. Honestly, it's a full-time job. So I would probably hire it out if I were you.
But it's up to you of course.
-
Thank you everyone for your response. So as a manufacturer, I am far from an SEO guy. Would it behoove me to go with an expert to review?
Additionally, as far as SEO companies, we didn't switch, we just quit using. We used one that I thought was top-shelf, but they did many blackhat techniques and actually hurt our rankings during the one Google update - this was in 2011. Rankings improved after we quit using them.
I think the content on the new site is good. The old site had tons of keyword stuffing, so we cleaned up our descriptions so they read more human-like.
-
Basically I'd add to the already helpful comments here by saying - is it possible the redesign has bad content? Have you researched keyword density and on-site optimization for the keywords you are targeting? Using a tool like ranks.nl, figure out what changed in this regard.. Surely you have backups of the old site to compare to but if not use the Wayback machine.
It might be completely focused on the site's new content and have nothing at all to do with redirection or link juice. That would be my first guess, but as everyone has said it could be any number of things or all of the above.
-
404's won't harm rankings, as long as it is a properly formatted 404. Did you change SEO companies as well? the reason I ask is that it might be more than just the redesign, it may be the links they are building.
-
Hi Joshua,
There are so many potential causes for your problem.
Take a look at this post.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/42824/
I would also check your canonical tags. Sometimes during redesigns on platforms they get left and ignored. I've also seen quite a few issues with mega menu type designs and no follow links. The list is kinda endless.
Try not to generate 404's for old products. They could be carrying links, try and redirect them or keep them if you plan on getting them back in stock. If the company didn't suggest doing that with products then I would also consider seeking out some consulting.
Rgds
Kyle
-
Hi Bryan:
I did submit the new sitemap to Google and all the pages appear to be indexed, they are just ranking way, way lower.
I did notice there are a lot of 404's listed in webmaster tools, but a lot of those are from old products we discontinued. The design company told me those won't hurt anything, but I am not sure.
-
Hello Joshua,
Did you let Google know in your webmaster tools?
Did you submit a new sitemap to Google?
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
-
Site redesign - 301 Redirects
I've just overhauled a website, leaving lots of former posts in the dust. I've set up a 404 redirect to the home page so that if anyone goes to one of those old pages they land on the home page instead of a dead 404. But, there's a couple urls from the old site I'd prefer to redirect to similar pages. These urls have forward slashes and I don't know how to get the slashes in when I copy it over to the new site. This is probably something easy, but I'm baffled. This www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury/whip-its-nitrous-oxide/ becomes this when I copy it www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury-whip-its-nitrous-oxide Can someone help me out?
Web Design | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Drop in rankings after AMP implementation because of lack of facebook comments
Hi, we are amplifying our site, but one of the things we can´t include on our AMP version is the Facebook comment box. Some of our articles have hundreds of comments on them and we noticed that Google was crawling those comments and using them as a ranking signal (the more comments the better we discovered). Now we are wondering if these articles would drop if we launch the AMP version without the comment box. As this would reduce the written content on those pages a lot. Anybody tested this before or has an idea on that would work out? Thanks for your help!
Web Design | | guidetoiceland1 -
Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Could our drop in organic rankings have been caused by improper mobile site set-up?
Site: 12 year old financial service 'information' site with lead gen business model. Historically has held top 10 positions for top keywords and phrases. Background: The organic traffic from Google has fallen to 50% of what it was over the past 4 months compared to the same months last year. While several potential factors could be responsible/contributing (not limited to my pro-active removal of a dozen old emat links that may be perceived as unnatural despite no warning), this drop coincides with the same period the 'mobile site' was launched. Because I admittedly know the least about this potential cause, I am turning to the forum for assistance. Because the site is ~200 pages and contains many 'custom' pages with financial tables, forms, data pulled from 3rd parties, custom/different layouts we opted for creating a mobile site of only the top 12 most popular pages/topics just to have a mobile presence (instead of re-coding the entire site to make it responsive utilizing a mobile css). -These mobile pages were set up in an "m." subdomain. -We used bi-directional tagging placing a rel=canonical tag on the mobile page, and a rel=alternate tag on the desktop page. This created a loop between the pages, as advised by Google. -Some mobile pages used content from a sub page, not the primary desktop page for a particular topic. This may have broken the bi-directional 'loop', meaning the rel=canonical on the mobile page would point to a subpage, where the rel=alternate would point to the primary desktop page, even though the content did not come from that page, necessarily. The primary desktop page is the one that ranks for related keywords. In these cases, the "loop" would be broken. Is this a cause for concern? Could the authority held by the desktop page not be transferred to the mobile version, or the mobile page 'pull away' or disperse the strength of the desktop page if that 'loop' was not connected? Could not setting up the bi-directional tags correctly cause a drop in the organic rankings? -Our developer verified the site is set up according to Google's guidelines for identifying device screen size and serving appropriate version of page. -Are there any tools or utilities that I can use to identify issues, and/or verify everything is configured correctly? -Are we missing anything important in the set-up/configuration? -Could the use of a brand new subdomain 'm.' in and of itself be causing issues? -Have I identified any negative seo practices or pitfalls? Am I missing or overlooking something? While i would have preferred maintaining a single, responsive, site with mobile css, it was not realistic given the various layouts, and owner's desire to only offer the top pages in mobile format. The mobile site may have nothing to do with the organic drop, but I'd like to rule it out if so, and I have so many questions. If anyone could address my concerns, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg
Web Design | | seagreen0 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
What have your experiences with rankings after a redesign?
Hi, I am looking to get a site of mine a much needed redesign and was wondering what other peoples experiences have been with rankings in Google after the new site has gone live. It will be converted from html/css design to a PHP based CMS with added functionality such as filtering, sorting etc. I'm aware of some of the preventative measures that can be done to prevent loss of rankings (e.g. 301 redirects) but are there any others and in your experiences have they been successful preventing the site dropping out of favor or losing rankings? Kind regards Rosh
Web Design | | bizarro10000