We mapped 301's, uploaded htacces, submitted sitemap and still TANKED after redesign?
-
Hi All,
We had some great rankings on store.jrdunn.com since 2006 and we switched to just http://jrdunn.com with cleaner url structures about 13 days ago. We were on Volusion now Magento.
We mapped out a couple of thousand of 301's and carefully choose very similar landing pages on the new site. Uploaded an htcaccess file and submitted sitemap in GWT.
We have been correcting 404's and watching GWT like a hawk.
We dropped on several almost all of our great terms from page one to page 14 or 15 on the new site. We don't even rank yet on our own brand terms ?!?.
ORGANIC traffic has dropped more than 50%.
The only thing in our plan that we couldn't execute was using the "we moved" tool in GWT because they don't allow switches from subdomains to be entered. Bummer!
Do you think missing that one thing caused the plummet? In retrospect perhaps we changed too many things at once ie hosting, cms and going down to root url.
Anyways, I don't know what we can do from here but we'd sure be silly not to ask! Anybody's suggestions or past experiences with this situation would be huge!
Thanks so much in advance,
Sean
-
Yes, it really is a good video! I had the honor of Everett respond to one of my own QAs. By the way, what a nice website you have there! I'm actually in the watch niche as well.
-
Joseph what a great video. Truly had some actionable things for us and I highly recommend for business owners too! Thanks.
: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues as Everett Sizemore
-
Hi Marie,
Thanks so much for your input. What an amazing group of people here. We will check everything but pretty sure is wasn't an algorithm update since we didn't switch till the 9th and old site traffic was fine. Regardless we will be vigilant with your suggestions.
Right now I have to say Maximilian Peters nailed a lot of technical issues that needed correcting. Did I say this is a great site with tons a bright people. As a business owner, not an expert, this is huge!
Marie, thanks again
-
Thanks Marie...
Sean, you can read Marie's "Unnatural Link Penalty" articles on Moz.com....
http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines
-
"Lots of pages like this and this on other websites pointing multiple links with big money anchor text like "engagement rings" at your site. These types of pages on other sites can trigger Penguin and Unnatural Links penalties. "
I haven't had time to take a deep look at your site but you mentioned that you made the switch to the new urls approximately 13 days ago. That would mean that the switch was around October 9. There was a refresh of the Penguin algorithm on October 4. I would perhaps have a look at your analytics data for organic traffic and see if it is possible that the drop happened on that day (Oct 4 or 5). It may be that this is a Penguin issue rather than a site change issue.
I'm not saying 100% whether this is the issue, but it's worth looking into.
-
Have you been watching your redirect log to see if there are any errors there? I would take a look at http://phantomjs.org and automate the redirect rules you have and watch the log file.
Also, go ahead and take a look here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/rewritemap.html which is faster then the 301s you have in your htaccess.
Also for magento seo, you're going to want to watch this: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues as Everett Sizemore done a lot with eCommerce and magento. He goes through common issues.
Good luck!
-
OK... Good to know.
I think that an "education" section like that would be a great way to earn some social shares, acquire some links and help customers. I know that as a GG, yours would be superb. Good to see you getting into the SEO of your site.
-
Yes jrdunnblog was our blog we started many moons ago but hasn't been too active lately and jrdunndiamonds is actually another store with that ironically has nothing to do with ours. He and my father share the exact name!
-
Egol,
Thanks for your response and providing us some additional actionable information! Much appreciated.
Best,
Sean
-
Why did the drop occur? I don't know.... but I see quite a few things that google does not like.
** Lots of pages like this and this on other websites pointing multiple links with big money anchor text like "engagement rings" at your site. These types of pages on other sites can trigger Penguin and Unnatural Links penalties. I would stop this type of spam immediately. You might need to have these pages taken down or links removed if you have been hit with Unnatural Links or Penguin problems.
** Many of your designer and product pages have standard text on them that is used on many many sites across the web (over 100 here). This type of duplicate content can result in your pages simply being filtered from search or a Panda problem. These must be rewritten with unique and substantive content if you want this site to perform well.
** Lots of pages like this and especially this that have almost no text on them. These are linked from your top level navigation - not a sign of a rich website with content of value to the visitor. Lots of these zero content pages will trigger Panda problems. A big content investment is needed.
** Some old content is still in the SERPs. Although redirects were working, there were many duplicate content pages on the old CMS. Your rankings might come back after Google chokes all of this down, but for now you might be suffering because of this.
** Also lots of links in your footer that go nowhere. On the homepage footer look at "Gemstones" and Watches"... they go to. jrdunn.com/#
** jrdunnblog.com appears to be a satellite site created with the intent of manufacturing links to your primary site. Lots of dupe content on jrdunndiamonds.com such as gemstone descriptions.
What is causing your current problems? Any one of the above could be the cause or a combination or things that I didn't notice.
For more information on diagnosing traffic drops see http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/
-
Maximilian,
A huge thank you for pointing me in the right direction and taking the time to respond! It looks like we certainly have our work cut out for us if we are to have a successful selling season. Oddly enough these were some of the things we set out to prevent during development but I was not knowledgeable enough to confirm it was done properly. Thanks again!
All the best,
Sean
-
Hi Sean,
The problem with Magento is that out of the box its not particularly that SEO friendly. There are quite a few canonical issues you get using just out of the box, caused by a variety of things such as sort= pages, duplicate category/product pages, duplicate home pages etc.
For example you have a duplicate home page which is indexed in Google here : http://jrdunn.com/home
There are duplicate pages caused by pages such as sort pages:
http://jrdunn.com/designers/marco-bicego.html?mode=grid&p=4 A duplicate of http://jrdunn.com/designers/marco-bicego.html (just sorted different)
Also having a quick look at your site in the index you have hundreds of duplicate home pages indexed. Some of these look like they are being caused by redirects from the old site and the fact that 404's are not correctly configured on the site, and others from search parameters on the new site.
The 2nd result from the Google search above is http://store.jrdunn.com/SearchResults.asp?searching=Y&sort=5&search=basha+pink&show=240
Which is one of the old site URLs which redirects (via a chain of redirects) to a page on the new site:
http://jrdunn.com/?searching=Y&sort=5&search=basha+pink&show=240 Which is a duplicate of the home page. This looks like non existing page and should return a 404 status, but you don't have 404's correctly configured, as any URL with a question mark in is a live version of the home page:
e.g: http://jrdunn.com/?TypeAnyThingHere
Also if you look on page 2 of that Google result above, you will see some URLs that are caused by the sort/search function of Magento and again are duplicates of the home page:http://jrdunn.com/?searching=Y&sort=5&search=tacori+diamond&show=160 This is really on scratching the surface of the problems that Magento can cause. You really need to carry out an extensive onsite audit, or perhaps consult with a Magento specialist.
Also you need to check the 301 redirects you have set from the old site, as you have all those invalid redirects from the old site that are going to non existing pages on the Magento site.
I hope this is clear and helps give you a starting point for your troubleshooting.
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
-
Looking for list Pro's & Con's of removing Folder from URL?
Hi We have a sub-folder ("/shop-by-department/") which is pretty much useless on our site and I'm looking to remove it. But the team want a list of the Pro's & Con's in doing so. So for example I'll be changing www.example.ie/shop-by-department/furniture/beds/product-a to www.example.ie/furniture/beds/product-a I know there will be an intial hit as Google adjusts to the change but think it's definitely the way to go. I was lookng for a complete list of the Pro's & Con's to send onto the team. It'll be going to the traditional marketing (print, radio, etc.) too so can ve top-level points too. Hope you can help! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Are slides how's etc the new Splash Pages?
[How did Moz know that my question was about this?!] I've just completed an audit of nearly 50 websites in the tourism industry and 90% had a slideshow, large image or video taking up more than the initial screen on the fairly large screened Chromebook that I'm using. I'm advising them all to ditch this and am often getting resistance from the site owners and their web developers. I know that these can be better optimized for page load speed, which is poor for most of these sites, especially on mobile devices; but from a usability standpoint, are these affective at drawing in users? Do users take the time to view these? Are they annoyed at always having to scroll down to see if there is anything else useful on the homepage? I think they are like the splash pages of the past: poor for usability and SEO. I've advised to at least make sure that the images are sized so the top of the page fits any screen (some of them do resize well for mobile devices, but maybe not laptops/desktops), include text with calls to action and click through to relevant content. I've been noting that they aren't media businesses selling images or videos, so they need to get their offerings to the top of the page so that users can see and engage more quickly. Anyone have any stats or experience on this? Thanks, Ann
Web Design | | anndonnelly0 -
What’s the best tool to visualize internal link structure and relationships between pages on a single site?
I‘d like to review the internal linking structure on my site. Is there a tool that can visualize the relationships between all of the pages within my site?
Web Design | | QBSEO0 -
Is the 'too many links' caused by the tags?
Hello Just got my seomoz report and decided I better start takiling things. Got a lot of 'too many links' on the report. I don't have control over website design and before I talk to designer I thought I should have a bit of an handle on what I am talking about. I've taken one page that has 483 links. Is this caused by the tags box and would it be a good idea to have it removed? http://commonwealthcontractors.com/uk-visas/tier-2-general-visas-formerly-uk-work-permits/ Regards Niamh
Web Design | | Niamh20 -
Can't figure out what's going on with these strange 403's
The last crawl found a good number of 404's and I can't figure out what's going on. I don't even recognize these links. What's really strange is a few of them high a fairly decent page authority. For instance this one has a PA of 55: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http%3A%2F%2Feurosystems.it%2Fconf_commerciale%2Fimages%2Fdd.gif%3F%3F There are several more like this one also, it seems most of these new ones have "Feurosystems" in the link...I have no idea what that is. Just curious what you guys think is going on, why these are 404'ing, and how to fix it. Thanks. Edit: I took out the "%" from the links and I get this: http://noahsdad.com/?path=http3A2F2Feurosystems.it2Fconf_commerciale2Fimages2Fdd.gif3F3F which takes me to a page on my site. I have no idea what's going on, or what that link is. Hoping someone can chime in because this is strange. Another edit: I just checked out the Google Webmaster's and it looks like these errors are 403's and all started around March 21st. I have no idea what happend on March 21st to start causing all of these errors, but I'd sure like to get it fixed. 🙂
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Display a message after 301 redirect.
I know this one is a little more technical than pure SEO, but it somewhat ties in. I'm redirecting 2 sites to one. The companies have combined, and I've imported all their content that has been created, and the url mapping is set up correctly. So it currently is set up like this: A.com --> C.com
Web Design | | WilliamBay
A.com/blogpost-1 --> C.com/blogpost-1 B.com --> C.com B.com/blogpost-20 --> C.com/blogpost-20 What i would like is some method a redirect when landing at C.com or C.com/blogpost-XX. And in turn display a message in a DIV so I can style it. And yes, I have nothing better to do on a Friday night 🙂0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0