Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
-
Hi All,
I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago.
My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website.
We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore.
Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store.
Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords.
We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right.
Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?.
I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx
i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ?
Or is all this expected when doing such changes ?
Any advice greatly appreciated ..
Pete
-
Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy.
I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well.
hopefully things will sort itself out.
Many thanks
Pete
-
I feel your frustration! You spent months planning & removing any type of old SEO tactic, and your rankings have tanked. I know it's a little late since you've already launched, but the first thing I have to say is how important it is to set the right expectation whenever making large site updates - especially those including URL rewrites. In my experience, it can take anywhere from 1-4 months to see a turnaround, but there are of course things you should be doing in the mean time.
You mentioned removing a lot of duplicate/thin content pages & letting thousands 404 - rather than creating so many broken pages (thus losing all possible link equity from those old pages), I recommend 301 redirecting them to the most relevant new page. So 50 pages with thin content about 'carpet cleaning equipment' should be 301 redirected to /cleaning-equipment/carpet-cleaners.
Other things to consider if you haven't already:
- updating all internal links
- updating all external links on sites you own (social!)
- stepping up paid ads at least until rankings turn around
- stepping up other inbound marketing tactics - email marketing
- stepping up social engagement, especially on Pinterest! Think of all the homeowners/DIYers/potential customers on that site!
- generating new content that will engage your audience & also build quality links
- ideas from this article: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
I hope this helps!
-
I've gone through several large relaunches in recent years. I kept bullet point notes on what should be done to avoid ranking decline & wrote about it on my blog, hope it helps - http://www.andy-maclean.net/seo-website-relaunch-checklist/.
If results fell off a cliff, my 1st port of call would be checking the redirects were handled correctly, nothing untoward is going on with your robots.txt file and check GWT for any significant issues.
Andy
-
Hi ,
We used do wedding hire aswell but we disavow those links we could not get removed and tidied up our link profile where we could. We have a few directory listings which we have kept but they are for citation purposes.
Thanks
pete
-
I'd look at your link profile. You have a strong connection to weddings which is not your niche, along with suspect directory listings.
-
Dear Pete,
i just checked your website with nibbler: http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.bestathire.co.uk
Perhaps there are some things here which you can use to your advantage. Indeed it is possible that you were hit by one of the updates. This could be because of your backlink profile (maybe) or for some other reason which unfortunately may not be clear. All I can say at this moment is to keep doing good things and rankings might return in the same fashion as they disappeared (I've had that happen once or twice).
Good luck.
Regards
Jarno
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
-
Baffled by this site's inability to rank
Hi guys, I've been working on a site for quite a while and it has a really good link profile, excellent content, no errors or penalties (as far as I can tell) but for some reason it consistently ranks below a lot of thin poor quality websites with spammy EMDs and a few obviously paid links from old-skool business directories etc. It has a significantly higher DA and linking root domains that almost all of them. Also it just bounces around from #40 to #28 to#35 to #40 to #28 on a weekly basis for many of our primary keywords. There just seems to be no logic to this and it goes against everything I know and everything we're taught. (I should probably point out that I've been doing this quite a while and have a number of other sites ranking extremely well in quite a few different verticals), Has anyone ever experienced anything like this and what did you do? Before I throw in the towel it would be good to hear from others and try and understand why this happens and if there is anything else I can try to help my client and fix it. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Does site size (page count) effect search ranking?
If a company has a handful of large sites that function as collection of unique portals into client-specific content (password protected), will it have any positive effect on search ranking to migrate all of the sites to one URL structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trideagroup0 -
Need Perfect URLs
I'm redesigning a site's structure from the ground up, and am having issues with the URLs. I'd love to have them be perfect, but kept finding conflicting advice online. 1. For my services blog, is it best to have it set up like www.example.com/services/keyword or
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stryde
www.example.com/keyword There seems to be conflicting advice as to keep it short and keep the keyword as far to the left as possible, but also that including the word services would help with long tail phrases and site organization. 2. For my blog section, is it best to have it set up like
www.example.com/blog/keyword or
www.example.com/keyword or
www.example.com/blog-post-title-with**-keyword**-in-it It's similar to the first question, but also adds the question of including the entire post title in the URL or just the keyword. Your help would be greatly appreciated!1 -
Improvement in rankings then site dissapears from SERPS?
Yesterday I saw significant improvements in rankings and the first page resulapp for several keywords appeared to have changed and included my site. Today the results appear to have reverted back and my site is nowhere to be seen. At least before I was in the top 100 but now I'm nowhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Need Reviews on my new website
Hi, I recently developed this website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 And started link building to that website and getting some very good links so far. So far ok, but i would request some experienced guys here to post some reviews and help me with your suggestions so that i can rank better. Its been a month since i started link building to this site. . PS: I have cloned my competitors site with unique content. Will this becomes an issue? You can check my competitors site by Google'in my site entire title. Please let me know your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegit0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
New links not showing in site explorer ?
I have built links to my site this past month that I know are live and in place and some do follow and some no follow ... Are the no follow links just not going to show up in my site explorer data ? And the others - why would they not be showing up yet ? SeoMoz updated thier link data aug 1st , my site has been crawled since then , but this new work I have done for link building have not shown up - None of them ? Its like I did not do any work ? how long could it take for them to show up and affect my site trust ect ? Also is there anything I vould be doing to speed the process up of having the new links found ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90