After 301 redirects average rankings went down a little. Any idea?
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We have changed the design of a website, from an oscommerce site to a new responsive website with customized programming.
After the 301 redirects we have lost 1 to 2 positions in Google Rankings of the most visited categories.
This are real data
<colgroup><col span="5" width="80"></colgroup>
| page | brand | page | CTR | average position |
| old | fagor | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/fagor-m-41.html | 15% | 6,6 |
| new | fagor | http://www.electrorecambio.es/fagor | 13% | 7,2 |
| old | teka | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/teka-m-39.html | 12% | 7,2 |
| new | teka | http://www.electrorecambio.es/teka | 9% | 8,8 |
| old | balay | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/balay-m-81.html | 12% | 7,4 |
| new | balay | http://www.electrorecambio.es/balay | 11% | 8,6 |
| old | bosch | http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/bosch-m-44.html | 10% | 7,4 |
| new | bosch | http://www.electrorecambio.es/bosch | 8% | 11 |Edited: As this table is not shown properly I have added an image
For you to check the old page you can see the old urls in the folder tienda2. For example
http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda/bosch-m-44.html
can be checked in
http://www.electrorecambio.es/tienda2/bosch-m-44.html
I would like to know if you see any important information that could justify this drop down in rankings
Thanks!!!
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I just did a similar migration Oscommerce to Magento, because the site was so big took a while for Google indexed all the new URLs even with the 301. We lost a little bit of traffic in the first 3 weeks but in the forth week we recovered the same traffic we had before the new site went up and in the following weeks we just kept growing. Right now we have 20% more traffic.
The drop in ranking it's normal right after a big migration, when Seomoz became Moz they also saw a few weeks of drop in the organic traffic. I wouldn't worry too much about it yet. Just make sure your on page optimizations are well done in the new website and wait for big G complete your new website index.
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To go along with that, when did you set up the redirects? It can take 2-3 weeks for rankings to bounce back to where they once were.
In addition, you changed the site design/structure which could also affect rankings. Perhaps a paragraph of text used to be near the top of the page which helped you rank well but in the new design, it is positioned lower so gets less relevance score.
Or maybe the new layout has more repeating elements (dupe text) or more links per page (decreasing authority per link). There are lots of things that could potentially explain the slight decrease.
I would give it a couple weeks to see how the rankings bounce back and re-evaluate then.
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It looks to me like Google has indexed the new URL version of the page yet but the ones ranking seem to be the old versions of the URLs and those are 301-redirecting, which can be slow, depending on where the searcher is located. It could be a speed issue that's causing the drop in rankings.
I didn't see a canonical tag on the new version of the pages. Adding those could help Google identify which page is the preferred version. It's going to take time for those old versions of your URLs to drop out of Google's index. You could use the URL remove tool in GWT, but if it's a large site this can be cumbersome.
Just some thoughts, not definitive by any means. I'm am curious to hear what others might have to say.
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