Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?

[PeteC12]

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

[PeteC12]

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

[Sheena_Schleicher]

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!

[AndyMacLean]

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

[PeteC12]

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

[MickEdwards]

I'd look at your link profile.  You have a strong connection to weddings which is not your niche, along with suspect directory listings.

[JarnoNijzing]

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