Drop In Rankings / Traffic... Can you find any technical issues with my site?
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I haven't spammed the engines, if anything I haven't done enough link building. So let me start here:
I split my old domain www.STbands.com into two separate domains - www.Suddora.com and www.CustomOnIt.com . The main site now goes to Custom On It and each page directly 301 as it was relevant. I knew there was going to be a little blow back...
The first month went fairly well but last week we noticed a dip in organic search traffic and sure enough some of our main keywords are now suffering.
I am wondering if this is because we haven't been building enough links to the new domains or if our new eCommerce CMS (magento enterprise) has technical SEO issues that is giving Google trouble. Nothing on GWT looks terribly wrong, should i be searching for something specific?
Anything helps at this point, we are in dire need of some direction on what could be wrong. Any suggestions?
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Let me just call this... "logical speculation"....
If you chop a domain's content in half and place it on two different websites, you have also just chopped all of the links, likes, mentions, etc in half.
If you do that you should expect every ranking everywhere to drop - because you now have less domain authority - you cut it in half.
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I would do a few things in addition to what you have done already (I think the results you are seeing right now really also depend on when you did the switch):
- Introduce a robots.txt and hint it with a Sitemap. If you have not manually submitted a site-map, do this as soon as possible. This will push Google to re-crawl your content.
- Fix your PageSpeed - you are scoring 58/100 which is really bad - see here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121004_PY_42T/
- Although you have RichSnippet product information on your site, it looks wrong - i.e. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.customonit.com%2Fcustom-slap-bands-silicone-bracelet-wristband.html&html=
I would try and fix the above - those are all simple and quick technical fixes. The Sitemap submission is probably the most important aspect and you should monitor the GWMT health and index ratio as well as the crawl rate.
I would then also compare the traffic on your new domains with your old domains. I would look out for change in traffic patterns and change in search terms. Your drop might be related to different copy on the new site.
I personally do find your site, categories and product pages a bit confusing (perhaps I am not your target-market), but it does not quite feel like an eCommerce site, but others might think differently. I am saying this in regards to UI/UX and not onpage SEO.
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Nakul,
Good point on the brand building the fact is all you need both to move-up in rank right now. I would concentrate on building relevant links from the most relevant authoritative sites you can. I would also focus on adding content strongly recommend that you have a blog to your websites. This will give you an opportunity to add content, a daily basis hopefully at least 4 times a week and get to much-needed attention from Google. I feel the matter what side is almost every site can benefit from a blog or a newsfeed whatever they want to call it basically new content that is relevant and well written. You may want to look into the entire structure of your site I'm not telling you to go nuts but really analyze it looks for small problems fix them then if you want some help with the writing I'd recommend a Word press plug-in that ALSO has a great web interface where you can copy and paste your content prior to posting in your blog or adding pages. It will then using your URL and give you suggestions based on different metrics it is a fantastic piece of software. FYI if you buy a theme I paid roughly 70% less than the advertised price because I purchased one WordPress theme not saying this is going to happen for you however I do know that every time I've put a studio press him up it at least gives me 50% off as a offer software is http://scribecontent.com/
please let me know if I can be of any more help to.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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Nakul,
Just sent you a private message.
Paul
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I would bet you are unfortunately suffering from the latest update in Google's algorithm. Approximately what time last week to this happen? How do you been going about building links can you going to a little but more detail about your methods? Here are your organic standings as of right now for each site. If you are to truly 301 redirect their website it should be to only one other site. You may be getting some blowback by 301 redirecting your site to two websites and not the one site is supposed to be redirecting to as you know it is a permanent redirect meaning the site no longer is here please look at the site not sites. is there a site you prefer over the other? Would strongly recommend linking the 301 redirect only one of those sites. Also I will take your link profile and have a look at it using a few different software's including my favorite SEOmoz however I will get more than one opinion. Have you done this yet? Have you looked for spam malware a bad links pointing to your site?
http://www.semrush.com/info/suddora.com+(by+organic)
http://www.semrush.com/info/www.customonit.com
I hope I can be of help to you I hope this is of help you in some way.
Sincerely,
Thomas
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Hey Paul. Good to see you here at SEOMoz.
Are you see drop in rankings for your primary head keywords or long tail keywords or both ?
You definitely do need to work on the link building as a continous process. Think of it more as Brand Building.
I also don't see any structural issues with either of your website that would cause any major indexing issues.
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