My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress
-
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress. Would this help in my rankings? It seems the hit came only that last 2-4 days when business become much quieter. Frankly i have no idea on why the site fell in ranking all of a sudden. Been comparing to competitors and even a friend in the same industry and nothing makes sense so far (link profile, DA, PA etc) This site has been ranking well for 3 years prior to this.
2. My site has loads of content and visitors arrive from various landpages. But by changing it wordpress, the url of most of them would probably change. What should i do? 301 redirect all of them or is there a better method?
-
It will not be wise to come up with a suggestion without looking deeply in to your website. There is a strong possibility that penalty hit your website because of your link profile and not your link structure...
Please drop your URL and if the problem is in your link profile then all you have to do is to find out the bad links and kill them accordingly! As a result you will see your rankings will started to come again with the time... if the problem is on the content on usability site then we probably need to look in to changing the content and site structure of the website.
At the moment all suggestions are quite blur.. I would appreciate if you drop your URL in order to get some solid information regarding your website.
-
Your current link structure should always be made as simple as possible
http://www.example.com/keyword-example/
If you have a lot of stuff like this http://www.example.com/P1268-172459:_20189/
or
keywordexampleofanchortext
vs
/keyword-example-of-anchor-text/
However the URL should not be over 70 characters and my example above is extremely long you know when I would recommend for many sites uses.
look at
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1061943
&
http://www.distilled.net/u/search-engine-basics/#crawling
Both are very good references but distilled.net/u/ I believe is most likely source of knowledge for technical SEO available right now.
If you get me a look at your URL I will tell you it is a site I believe should be remade and why exactly I think you got a drop in rankings recently. I don't want to jump to conclusions but this very well could be a penalty
-
Hi, I am a big proponent of using WordPress I think it is probably the best way to make the majority of sites out there. Although I would have to honestly look at your URL before I can tell you is the best way to go for you.
In all honesty the only way WordPress is going to advance you in the SERPS is if you have extremely bad page structure now and change it to WordPress you will be able to change the structure to be more search engine friendly eliminate using a lot of/Ajax Java that type of stuff. And the bots cannot crawl your content correctly.
However HTML, HTML5 WordPress, and WordPress HTML5 are all HTML-based. WordPress just has a database on top of it allowing for a much easier creation of content and ease-of-use by user and sometimes my search engines. The this depends 100% on how the existing site has been built.
Hosting makes a huge difference as well. If you were to go to word press I would strongly suggest the WP engine, Zippykid, web synthesis, or Pagely.
"2. My site has loads of content and visitors arrive from various landpages. But by changing it wordpress, the url of most of them would probably change. What should i do? 301 redirect all of them or is there a better method?"
If your current sites are doing alright and you have any pages in place. You would of course get sent to 301 redirect them to the new page that would take over for them. Usually do this again if the page is improperly made or the URL structure is not proper. You will always perform 301 redirects when migrating from one CMS for type of framework HTML in this case probably to a Nother. You will have to do 301 redirects to keep the link juice and domain ranking you currently have is always wise idea I should have penaltiesIf you want to send me a private message with your URL or posted here I would be happy to give you some better advice. I hope I have been help ,Thomas
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
-
Custom HTML or WordPress, it's Time to Decide
Today I start the face to face interviews with website companies. So far most have pushed WordPress, few have offered either and one insisted on Joomla. Our 50+ products and services are primarily customized, so we sell -10 on our shopping cart. We rely primarily on organic Google rankings, SEO and content is critical. What do you, my fellow Mozzers, recommend for our next website platform for our mobile world and Google friendliness? TY, KJr
Web Design | | KevnJr0 -
Switched from Wix to Wordpress dreaded hashtag URL
Recently took over managing a site for a non-profit which was using the dreaded Wix. Switched over to Wordpress but now Google still has the old URL's with the hashtag. Can't forward them in .htaccess and don't want to add javascript for fear of slowing down load time. I found a solution that seems like it will take hours and hours of work. I found the solution at http://www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ but it seems like it would take hours with all the URL's. I submitted an XML sitemap in Google webmaster tools. My question is, how serious could this effect SEO for my site? Google accepted the new sitemap but still has the old URL's in SERP. How long does this generally take to remove? Will the hashtag URL's penalize the site for duplicate content? If so is there a way to tell Google the homepage without hashtags is the page with original content? Sort of like the rel=canonical tag which I know wont work as the hashtag URL's all redirect to the homepage so they will all have the tag. Does Google ignore the hashtag? Could there even be a benefit to this, possibly the homepage getting more page authority due to the redirects? How serious is this? Thanks in advancing.
Web Design | | limited70 -
May open the site's homepage...?
In mobile search results, many of my inner pages show the title tag, but the link is removed. And instead of showing the meta description, there is the following: May open the site's homepage
Web Design | | Dino64
Try anyway | Learn more Both "Try Anyway" and "Learn more" are links. Try anyway used to link to the homepage, but after we removed a redirect plugin and got rid of all the html mobile pages (now we're just using the Wordpress responsive layout), the link is now going to the correct page. So, it in fact, does NOT "open the site's homepage" any longer. But, we're still seeing this on mobile searches for our inner pages. It's been almost 3 weeks now. Any ideas on how to get this back to normal?0 -
How does adding ecommerce to a site affect SEO? What are the negative and what are the positives?
We are thinking of adding ecommerce to our website as a service to our customers. We generate most of our leads through online quote requests but heard that it may be beneficial to our SEO if we add ecommerce for a few products. Is this true? Does anyone have tips on best and worst SEO ecommerce practices?
Web Design | | TeguarMarketing0 -
Retina Sites
What's the best way to make a site retina ready? Just code one site with retina resolution graphics or rather serve up two different sets of graphics depending on what comp is being used on the other end? Thanks in advance. I appreciate the input. Stephan
Web Design | | stephanwb0 -
Is this a good WP template for this site?
I need some advice, please. My cousin wants to take his site; http://www.gaport.com/ and move it to this wordpress theme http://themeforest.net/item/elvyre-retina-ready-html5-template/6639095. I have two reservations about this, but before I say anything I'd like the community's feedback, please. 1. It's a brand new theme. It's not even out for two weeks. That strikes me as a giant red flag. ** Just to clarify, i's not a new theme; it's new for WP. 2. It only costs $15. I can't tell what's wrong with this theme, but "you get what you paid for" is a cliche for a reason, and that price seems way too low for something quality. Are these legitimate concerns? Do you all have any recommendations for a theme that might suit him better? I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Bar Codes for Event Sites
A client is requesting bar codes for simple tracking of event attendees. Their need is to be able to verify at the door someone has registered and then have that data link to the registrant to show who did/did not attend, etc. We looked at QR code solutions (seems bar code makes more sense at this point) and now are at a point where we need input from any who have experience with either system and could potentially make a recommendation. A person would sign up for this once a year event (no charge, informational) on the site and be able to print off their registration ticket to bring to the event. If it could also be downloaded to iPhone/Android that would be a plus as well. When they come through the door the code is scanned and registrant is in. Simple. They currently keep a database of past attendees and only use it for general area the attendees are from and how many show over time, etc. Since we do not want to reinvent the wheel, we were hoping a mozzer might have insight. thanks, Robert
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles0