We mapped 301's, uploaded htacces, submitted sitemap and still TANKED after redesign?

[seandunn]

Hi All,

We had some great rankings on store.jrdunn.com since 2006 and we switched to just http://jrdunn.com with cleaner url structures about 13 days ago.  We were on Volusion now Magento.

We mapped out  a couple of thousand of 301's and carefully choose very similar landing pages on the new site. Uploaded an htcaccess file and submitted sitemap in GWT.

We have been correcting 404's and watching GWT like a hawk.

We dropped on several almost all of our great terms from page one to page 14 or 15 on the new site. We don't even rank yet on our own brand terms ?!?.

ORGANIC traffic has dropped more than 50%.

The only thing in our plan that we couldn't execute was using the "we moved" tool in GWT because they don't allow switches from subdomains to be entered.  Bummer!

Do you think missing that one thing caused the plummet? In retrospect perhaps we changed too many things at once ie hosting, cms and going down to root url.

Anyways, I don't know what we can do from here but we'd sure be silly not to ask! Anybody's suggestions or past experiences with this situation would be huge!

Thanks so much in advance,

Sean

[joseph.chambers]

Yes, it really is a good video! I had the honor of Everett respond to one of my own QAs. By the way, what a nice website you have there! I'm actually in the watch niche as well.

[seandunn]

Joseph what a great video. Truly had some actionable things for us and I highly recommend for business owners too! Thanks.

: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues as Everett Sizemore

[seandunn]

Hi Marie,

Thanks so much for your input.  What an amazing group of people here. We will check everything but pretty sure is wasn't an algorithm update since we didn't switch till the 9th and old site traffic was fine. Regardless we will be vigilant with your suggestions.

Right now I have to say Maximilian Peters nailed a lot of technical issues that needed correcting. Did I say this is a great site with tons a bright people.  As a business owner, not an expert, this is huge!

Marie, thanks again

[EGOL]

Thanks Marie...

Sean, you can read Marie's "Unnatural Link Penalty" articles on Moz.com....

http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines

http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too

[MarieHaynes]

"Lots of pages like this and this on other websites pointing multiple links with big money anchor text like "engagement rings" at your site.  These types of pages on other sites can trigger Penguin and Unnatural Links penalties.  "

I haven't had time to take a deep look at your site but you mentioned that you made the switch to the new urls approximately 13 days ago.  That would mean that the switch was around October 9.  There was a refresh of the Penguin algorithm on October 4.  I would perhaps have a look at your analytics data for organic traffic and see if it is possible that the drop happened on that day (Oct 4 or 5).  It may be that this is a Penguin issue rather than a site change issue.

I'm not saying 100% whether this is the issue, but it's worth looking into.

[joseph.chambers]

Have you been watching your redirect log to see if there are any errors there? I would take a look at http://phantomjs.org and automate the redirect rules you have and watch the log file.

Also, go ahead and take a look here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/rewritemap.html which is faster then the 301s you have in your htaccess.

Also for magento seo, you're going to want to watch this: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues as Everett Sizemore done a lot with eCommerce and magento. He goes through common issues.

Good luck!

[EGOL]

OK... Good to know.

I think that an "education" section like that would be a great way to earn some social shares, acquire some links and help customers.  I know that as a GG, yours would be superb.   Good to see you getting into the SEO of your site.

[seandunn]

Yes jrdunnblog was our blog we started many moons ago but hasn't been too active lately and jrdunndiamonds is actually another store with that ironically has nothing to do with ours.  He and my father share the exact name!

[seandunn]

Egol,

Thanks for your response and providing us some additional actionable information!  Much appreciated.

Best,

Sean

[EGOL]

Why did the drop occur?   I don't know.... but I see quite a few things that google does not like.

**  Lots of pages like this and this on other websites pointing multiple links with big money anchor text like "engagement rings" at your site.  These types of pages on other sites can trigger Penguin and Unnatural Links penalties.   I would stop this type of spam immediately.  You might need to have these pages taken down or links removed if you have been hit with Unnatural Links or Penguin problems.

**  Many of your designer and product pages have standard text on them that is used on many many sites across the web (over 100 here).  This type of duplicate content can result in your pages simply being filtered from search or a Panda problem.  These must be rewritten with unique and substantive content if you want this site to perform well.

** Lots of pages like this and especially this that have almost no text on them.  These are linked from your top level navigation - not a sign of a rich website with content of value to the visitor.  Lots of these zero content pages will trigger Panda problems.  A big content investment is needed.

** Some old content is still in the SERPs.  Although redirects were working, there were many duplicate content pages on the old CMS.   Your rankings might come back after Google chokes all of this down, but for now you might be suffering because of this.

** Also lots of links in your footer that go nowhere.  On the homepage footer look at "Gemstones" and Watches"...  they go to. jrdunn.com/#

** jrdunnblog.com appears to be a satellite site created with the intent of manufacturing links to your primary site.    Lots of dupe content on jrdunndiamonds.com such as gemstone descriptions.

What is causing your current problems?  Any one of the above could be the cause or a combination or things that I didn't notice.

For more information on diagnosing traffic drops see http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

[seandunn]

Maximilian,

A huge thank you for pointing me in the right direction and taking the time to respond! It looks like we certainly have our work cut out for us if we are to have a successful selling season. Oddly enough these were some of the things we set out to prevent during development but I was not knowledgeable enough to confirm it was done properly.  Thanks again!

All the best,

Sean

[Milian]

Hi Sean,

The problem with Magento is that out of the box its not particularly that SEO friendly. There are quite a few canonical issues you get using just out of the box, caused by a variety of things such as sort= pages, duplicate category/product pages, duplicate home pages etc.

For example you have a duplicate home page which is indexed in Google here : http://jrdunn.com/home

There are duplicate pages caused by pages such as sort pages:

http://jrdunn.com/designers/marco-bicego.html?mode=grid&p=4 A duplicate of http://jrdunn.com/designers/marco-bicego.html (just sorted different)

Also having a quick look at your site in the index you have hundreds of duplicate home pages indexed. Some of these look like they are being caused by redirects from the old site and the fact that 404's are not correctly configured on the site, and others from search parameters on the new site.

Click for Google Result

The 2nd result from the Google search above is http://store.jrdunn.com/SearchResults.asp?searching=Y&sort=5&search=basha+pink&show=240 

Which is one of the old site URLs which redirects (via a chain of redirects) to a page on the new site:

http://jrdunn.com/?searching=Y&sort=5&search=basha+pink&show=240 Which is a duplicate of the home page.  This looks like non existing  page and should return a 404 status, but you don't have 404's correctly configured, as any URL with a question mark in is a live version of the home page:

e.g:  http://jrdunn.com/?TypeAnyThingHere
Also if you look on page 2 of that Google result above, you will see some URLs that are caused by the sort/search function of Magento and again are duplicates of the home page:

http://jrdunn.com/?searching=Y&sort=5&search=tacori+diamond&show=160 This is really on scratching the surface of the problems that Magento can cause. You really need to carry out an extensive onsite audit, or perhaps consult with a Magento specialist.

Also you need to check the 301 redirects you have set from the old site, as you have all those invalid redirects from the old site that are going to non existing pages on the Magento site.

I hope this is clear and helps give you a starting point for your troubleshooting.