Site Doing Horrible After Redesign

[josh330]

Hello Fellow Forum Members:

Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this.

• Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform.  We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings.
• By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site.
• As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%.
• Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently.
• In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with.
• By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more.
• Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best.

So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform?

We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.

[josh330]

I will try that.  Thank you Erik for your input.

[erikellsworth]

Reach out to Volusion...I suspect they'll have all that data since it has only been 10 days.  It will cost you but at least you could prove your theory.

[josh330]

You're correct Erik.  The only backup I did of my Volusion site was the customers, products and sale reports. My Volusion account was closed on 6/15 so that restore is not an option.

I also understand what you're saying about yet another move and the issues that could come with that. You've given me a lot to think about here.  Thank you.

[erikellsworth]

In my opinion, no.  Moving to another platform puts you another iteration away from the original solution.  If you do move and things don't get better then what?  You'll have double the 301's to address.

My recommendation would be to restore your store back to Volusion to verify your conclusions but I suspect you 1) did not make a full backup of your store's data and data files; and 2) you did not keep your Volusion store active (no-indexed and not attached to your domain) until you were sure everything was in proper order.

Don't forget that the Volusion Product Name Short field serves two purposes: one, as the URL and two, as the anchor text on your category pages (which directly affects your internal link structure).  It could be due to your breadcrumbs as Volusion takes the primary category of your site and uses it as the breadcrumb.  I'm not sure how that got transferred over either.

I think your BC store is salvageable but not without fully investigating the issues via your store and your analytics...as well as your back link profile.  For all we know it could simply be the latest Google updates.

[josh330]

Thank you Erik, I understand what you are saying.  These are things I did not know which is why I had hired the company to handle the migration.  They came highly recommended from BC and I trusted that they would do this stuff all the time. I make equipment for dogs, which I am good at.  I know that I know nothing about full website migrations, but I believed a trusted BC partner would.

The 269 in my example was the Volusion category ID, not the SKU.

Identifying these things in Analytics is not what I would call easy for me. I can tell I am going to have to learn a lot more about this subject if I want to understand things which is why I joined this community. The first order of business is to get our site back where it was. Does it sound to you like it can be addressed on the current platform?

[erikellsworth]

www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html could be more powerful than www.website.com/myproduct/ but it could also be weaker.  You've added in the category name which may be redundant (I'm not sure without more information) and you've weakened the power of "myproduct" brought to your SEO.  Plus, you have now removed the 269 which for most people is the manufacturer's SKU or UPC code which many people search.

If a lot of your traffic was SKU-related (which you can easily find in your analytics), then you definitely took a step backwards instead of forwards.

Yes, BC gives you much greater flexibility and power with your URLs, but you need to carefully evaluate how to use that power and really understand your current traffic and its origins.

[josh330]

Thank you Erik for the reply.  I switched the URLs based on the recommendation that the BC URLs were much more user friendly.  For example www.website.com/myproduct/ was better than www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html.

I feel we're missing something too!

[erikellsworth]

Curious why you didn't keep your current Volusion URLs?  With BigCommerce (which we are a partner), you can match the Volusion URL and forego the 301 redirect if you feel that's critical to your SEO success.  A proper 301 redirect should be adequate and not account for such a dramatic drop of traffic.

As an ecommerce consultant you need to understand where your traffic was coming from and make sure that's protected when you move.  For example, if your products have a lot of Facebook Likes, when you change the URL, you will lose 100% of those Likes...and this should be a factor in choosing a new platform.

You should be able to diagnose what's happening from your Google Analytics.  Take a look at where traffic has dropped.  What landing pages were driving traffic before and no longer are?  What keywords have disappeared and what pages were appearing for those keywords?  Are those pages 301'd correctly?  What products and categories were driving your traffic and revenue?

Obviously check all your pages for proper meta tags (INDEX, FOLLOW)...with these "simple" platforms, it is easy to accidentally make your whole store disappear.

It sounds to me like something was missed during the migration and you're now.  We are a top Volusion consulting firm and have worked on hundreds of stores...and we're partners of both BigCommerce and 3dcart.  You can have a successful store on a hosted platform.  Having PHP access is not critical to your success.  Yes, it can help but you migrated from Volusion which has much more restrictions than BigCommerce (in terms of what you can accomplish from a template perspective and SEO)...so I feel we're missing something here.

[josh330]

It was supposed to be every page and I was charged $600+ just for the redirecting part of the process separate and part from the design.

[AWCthreads]

Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.

[AWCthreads]

You may be in need of a second opinion.

[josh330]

You can see why I'm so confused!

[josh330]

You are absolutely correct.  A different platform, but a hosted one nonetheless.

[AWCthreads]

Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.

[josh330]

Our developer and SEO are different folks and my relationship with each of them is completely independent from the other.  Great question though.

[josh330]

Yes, we were. Page 1, between position 3 and 7 on our main niche keywords.

[AWCthreads]

Also, is your developer and SEO the same?

Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.

[AWCthreads]

Were you ranking well prior to the move?

[DennisSeymour]

Definitely a possible reason as you are already losing traffic from it already. Something you should look at ASAP. Those pages should be redirecting to the correct, new pages so I'm wondering why they werent properly 301'ed. Was the 301 service only sending your previous homepage to the new homepage and not per page? (Or even old pages to the new homepage)

[josh330]

I have not. I will mention that to our developer and see if she's heard of it.

[josh330]

Thanks for the response.  I'm only going off some of the things we were told to implement that we can't because that code is off limits. Can't implement canonical tags on home page, can't get rid of the https versions of all pages (home page, product pages, etc), can't put the blog on the root domain, etc.  It sounded like a big deal to me, but SEO and coding is not what I do, so I really wouldn't know any better.

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.  Our SEO found quite a few pages that had good ranking that are now returning 404s. Is that what you mean by the the 301 being to blame?

[AWCthreads]

Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?

[jesse-landry]

Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...

[josh330]

The reasoning, as I understand it, is that the hosted solutions will never give you complete control over coding.

Their input was this: You are going to want to stay away from hosted solutions if you want to have full control over your site and experience. So we would recommend against going with something like this, for instance.

[DennisSeymour]

When we handle big sites like this, there are a lot of possible problems that we face, some of which are

• the traditional ecommerce problem of "unique content" - maybe generic content or copied from a supplier (not saying you are doing this, Im just putting it out there)
• another traditional problem with category pages and it's contents

These 2 could affect rankings. Honestly, 404's dont matter much for us unless it's a vital part of the site, not on any pages of the site or if it had a lot of links pointing to it previously

if it's worthless, we just let them die, so GWT can stop bugging us with it by next year lol.

The 301 is actually the first thing that could be blamed as it might not be able to pass the same juice as it could before all the algo updates. You could try restoring the old site on a new CMS that you choose and run this side by side but it might be too much trouble.

[AWCthreads]

Why are they giving you that suggestion?  What is their reasoning?

[josh330]

We were looking at the Magento Community Edition, although I know we'll still have development costs.

The recommendation I've been given was to stay away from all hosted cart solutions: Volusion, Bigcommerce, 3dCart, Shopify, etc.

[AWCthreads]

If you're trying to keep your business alive, Magento may be pricey for you.

Have you looked at 3dCart?

[jesse-landry]

I would lean towards Magento for similar reasons to what Dennis said already. Also I just have had poor Wordpress experiences and feel like Google is out to get 'em. That last part is all in my head and completely made up but that's enough to sway me towards Magento.

[josh330]

Thank you Jesse for your response.  Yes, our PPC campaigns have been what has been keeping us afloat.  We have managed to keep our business alive, albeit in a much more expensive way.

When you say bite the bullet and rebuild, do you feel the Wordpress option or Magento option is a better place to begin research?

[jesse-landry]

maybe (maybe) sharing the URL will help..? hard to say, really, what the problem is.

[jesse-landry]

I agree with Dennis. Sounds like it's time to bite the bullet and re-build. Take it as a lesson and move on.

In the meantime, have you considered driving in traffic through a PPC campaign? Might stop the bleeding..

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.

The links mostly pointed to our home page and some of our main category pages, so those did redirect accordingly. We also saw a slight decline in during the Google updates, but had recovered most of the way from those. In GA, it is easy to see the traffic drop begins when our redesign launched.

You said, "If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it.". To be honest, that's what we can't figure out.  Did the lack of comprehensive 301's which caused a lot of 404's cause this, or our platform choice.  That's what we don't know but are trying to figure out before we make a big move.

Our product catalog is probably around 600+ products right now but will be heading into the thousands by year's end.

Don't know if this response helps at all or not.

[DennisSeymour]

Have you continued link building work on the current domain ever since you 301'ed it? It's really a tricky situation. It could be due to old links on the original domain (especially after penguin in may and the monthly pandas)

If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it. Magento is actually pretty seo friendly and since you have a dev, then it's even easier. I would not recommend wordpress for big ecommerce sites so it will depend on your site's size.