Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Hi Mozers,

I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward.

To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com.  I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances  ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month.

The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with  /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then:

CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks

CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks

PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks

REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8

Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward?

Any advice is much appreciated,

Thank you!!!

abBN3

[danatanseo]

You might also ask Volusion if they have changed your site to a new server recently. I assume you are on a shared or semi-dedicated server with them. Sometimes, as you well know, if one of the other sites on that server loses reputation, it can effect you too.

Volusion has also had some down-time recently. That may be a factor too.

You are right about shocking the engines. It happens, but then usually things bounce back. It sounds to me like you are really doing all the right things. Be patient, I think you're going to be fine. Your link profile at Ahrefs.com looks really good. It sounds like you have good instincts.

Let me know what happens!

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Again, thank you for your feedback!

I may have changed a few of the product codes which should create a 404, but i had a catch all redirect so now they are soft 404. I only have 29 total, or 20 more than when i started. I will make sure to fix, even if this is not the cause.

With 1200 pages, and 600 products I am confident that +20 soft 404's is causing 25% week over week traffic, hurting me from 2K a week to 1K a week.

See screenshot from webmaster tools

http://imgur.com/90vIh

I am so puzzled by this.

I think that I have just shocked the engines. I have done it before, hurt for 6 weeks, then back to normal, hopefully better (fingers crossed).

[danatanseo]

Hi Chris,

Hah! What a coincidence. Okay, so I do have a specific siggestion pertaining to Volusion. Yes, you are correct in that when you are first setting up your store, if you write SEO friendly URLs (I believe they pull it from the "Product Name Short" field), Volusion automatically takes care of the redirect in that situation. However, if you then decide to change one of those, I believe you need to manually set up a redirect in the 301 redirects database section of the back end. This may even be true if you had default URLs, launched your store, got crawled and indexed and then updated to a SEO-friendly URL. (You may want to check with Volusion on that - but sometimes their tech support is hit or miss).

You may have already done this too, so again, if so, I apologize

Also, have you checked to see if Google might still be indexing the old URLs in addition to the new ones? If so, when you click on the old one, are you getting a 404, does it stay the same, or does it redirect? If it redirects, what is the canonical tag? When I was last on Volusion they hadn't implemented a good way to manage canonical tags either. Because of their template, the canonicals were all http://www.MY-STORE.com , which wasn't good. They may have improved that since I managed one of their stores, not sure.

Also, are the stats in your original question purely out of SEOMoz, or are they from Google Analytics? I find SEOMoz can occasionally fluctuate wildly if I change targeted keywords in a campaign.

Just some thoughts to hopefully help!

Dana

[longdenc_gmail.com]

Great question! Sorry i forgot to mention,  I have been on volusion for a while, so all 301R is managed automatically.

When i switched to volusion originally (9 months ago?) the 301R was mismanaged, lost a lot of traffic, but after about 4 months it was back to normal.

Knowing that all links are redirected in my recent change, do you have any suggestions/thoughts on what to do to regain my traffic?

[danatanseo]

Hi Chris,

You didn't mention 301-redirects in your post. Did you set up 301-redirects for all of the URLs that you changed? If not, that explains the drop. If you did set them up, have you checked them all to make sure they are redirecting properly?

What about canonical tags? Did you update your canonical tags to reflect the new URLs?

In 2008 I worked for a company that migrated from self-hosting to Volusion and all of their URLs change. I was not doing SEO for them (yet), and they mismanaged their 301-redirects and lost about half of their traffic. It took a long time to recover. The good news is once they fixed the 301s the site traffic came back iwthin about 6 weeks (but I know 6 weeks can seem like an eternity).

Hope these questions aren't too basic and hope this helps somewhat.

Dana