Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero

[Gokart]

Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with...

I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help?

Any input greatly appreciated

[BradsDeals]

Building on that answer, Google Webmaster Console should also be able to give you a list of URLs that are resulting in 404 errors. Those are going to excellent contenders for a 301.

[CleverPhD]

You bet!  Hopefully this helps when you start digging into things!

[Gokart]

Marvellous help Mr PhD - you've cleared up some crucial basics for me - many thanks!

[CleverPhD]

Nope you dont need access.  You set the 301s up on the current server.  When the current server gets a request for an old page, it then knows where to send the user to, using the 301.

If also, if you don't mind, please mark my response as a "Good answer" with Moz.

Cheers!

[Gokart]

...so I don't need to access the previous website on its previous hosting to set up a 301?

[CleverPhD]

301 the old URLs to the new URLs.  Try to keep a one-to-one relationship on the old page to the new pages.  The old bedroom page 301s to the new bedroom page, the old dining room page 301s to the new dining room page, etc.   You would not want to redirect the old bathroom URLs to the new dining room URLs.

You need to pick if the site is www or non www.  Lets say you pick non www as your default.   Make sure if anyone types in a www URL on your site that you 301 that page to the non www counterpart. Just as above, one-to-one relationship.  Make sure that any links on your site link to the proper nonwww URL.  Any tools you use (moz etc) make sure they start with the non www version of the website.

Good post here by Cyrus on redirects here at Moz as well.

[Gokart]

It's worse than that - I've looked after the site for the last 5 years, so it's my own fault

Last 2 questions (I promise) -

1. once I've established the old URLs, how do I re-direct to the new site?

2. How do I combine www and non-www (if that's what I need to do)

Really appreciate your input on this - classic case of an old graphic designer thinking he can SEO after a couple of Lynda courses

[CleverPhD]

1. If you want to find out what the general structure of the old site: Google Internet Archive and then enter your site URL.  You will see snapshots and be able to pull it all together. Bing webmaster tools actually does a pretty good job of showing old site structure and that may help.

If you want to try and figure out what pages used to rank: You can also use various linking tools (Moz OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs) and Google and Bing webmaster tools to find how people are linking to you.  This will not give you all of the old URLs on your site, but at least the most important ones.  Those are the most likely that ranked.    Google webmaster tools will show some average ranking data going back about 3 months so you may be able to recover it there.

You can also look through your old analytics data and that would tell you what URLs were getting the most organic traffic there and based on the content figure out what was doing well.  While the old site is not live, do you have any way to access the old analytics data.

The www vs non www would result in needing 301s as well.  Those are two different subdomains and so you would have 2 different pages according to Google.

2. You need to talk to the developer to see if anything happened 2 months ago.  Maybe they changed from www to non www and that would need a full 301 setup to direct Google from the old site to the new site.

This just sounds like a site migration gone bad and unless you can ask around for data from the previous provider, it will be tricky to figure out.

[Gokart]

Gosh - that's a fine response!

I've actually moved the site from an Adobe Business Catalyst site (html) to WordPress.

1. The previous site is no longer live, so I don't know how I could get the URLs that were ranking to make sure they 301 redirect?

2. The drop off seems to have happened in the last 2 months although the site was re-built around March time?

...also, I've submitted the site to Google as "princessdesign.co.uk" rather than "www.princessdesign.co.uk" - could that have interfered? - I'm puzzled by the internet archive reference.

I'll check out the meta descriptions - top tip. Any help with these two points would be most helpful, as it would appear I have a lot of homework to do!

Thanks

Mark

[CleverPhD]

Hello!

I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/

The design and URL structure is different from what you have today.  Did you recently relaunch the site?

On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section

http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html

that URL 301 redirects to this page

http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html

and that page shows a 404 error page.

So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.

You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not.  I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling.  The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads.  Similarly, only the home page has a meta description.   While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through.  That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not.   With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.

This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong.  Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!

Good luck!