Big SEO Changes

[moon-boots]

Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below!

So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself.

So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be?

Here are some specific questions:

• Canonical Problem?

My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue?

The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not?

i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same.

http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts

http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts

Is this a problem for SEO?

• Duplicate Product Tag Problem?

I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt?

i.e.

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown

• Site Code Structure

When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts?

Website: http://thespacecollective.com

Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!

[JordanLowry]

The pages are loading now not sure what was causing that but Id keep an eye on it.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions. I don't mind helping out if I can.

[moon-boots]

Which extension are you referring to, the first or second?

I've already set up a Moz campaign and I've got a tutorial booked with one of the Moz team so they can walk me through it, but I understand how duplicate pages work right now so I can go about actioning them. I'll take a look at Screaming Frog, thanks for the heads up about that!

I didn't think there was anything more than 3 pages deep ''category > sub-category > product'' is how I have it structured, am I missing something?

I just checked all three pages and they appear fine to me?

Also, thank you VERY much for taking the time to respond to all this, I'm sure you have better things to do than help a newbie.

[JordanLowry]

Thats a pretty neat extension. I would not remove the redirects in that case. I would identify all areas where you have duplicate content and implement canonicals as appropriate. Set up a Moz campaign with the site and Moz will crawl your site and give you a list of duplicated pages and you can begin to work through the duplicated pages.

I ran a quick crawl with Screaming Frog - if you dont use this tool I would highly recommend it. I noticed the depth of your site is fairly deep up to 8 pages or so I would make sure I had a strong internal linking procedure in place. Another issue to look into when I was crawling the site I noticed several pages where the connection timed out.

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-models/apollo-model

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-models/metal-earth-28

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-models/metal-earth-26

[moon-boots]

After the site was hacked it was up for a good few weeks, it wasn't taken offline or anything. My SEO/Hosting company said they would look into it, they didn't, and in the end I just switched to the new site design on a different server entirely (thus moving away from said SEO/Hosting company). I then went through the Google process, requested they review my site, they did and it came back clean. The old site was hacked through the blog, and I have not redirected any of the blog posts because I'm not sure that is a good idea.

Here is the extension I am using: https://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=27627&token=d6d5c4d2ae2c8f5d02d99ad5e0e93855

I am considering using this though: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=20468&filter_search=canonical url

The extension adds ''noindex,follow''. From what I've read I want the follow in place as it passes on some juice. I have products appearing in several categories simultaneously so I felt that a 301 wasn't a good option.

[JordanLowry]

The site was hacked so I would be concerned redirecting a hacked domain to a new domain. What steps did you take once the site was hacked? What extension are you using to inject the html code for canonical tags into your site?

As far as learning Moz is a great starting place to gain information to get you started. Go through all the whiteboard friday's if you can and read blogs related to SEO.

[moon-boots]

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for the response! I don't have a new domain, or do you mean the domain going from www.thespacecollective.com to thespacecollective.com?

If I don't 301 the old URLs won't I lose all my link juice from the previous site? I asked Google to review the site after I changed it to the newer version and they gave it the all clear so why would this be an issue? It would essentially be like losing the past 5 years work wouldn't it and starting again from nothing?

I'm installing an extension onto my site that will allow me to mark colonical pages with ease, thanks for the advice regarding that!

I read the beginners guide, it didn't hold any information I didn't already know. I've been reading quite a lot over the last few days.

[JordanLowry]

One reason for the low traffic is you now have a new domain. I would consider not 301'ing the old url's to the new domain since the website was hacked. I would also look at canonicalizing any duplicate content. For the different url's showing the same content I would consider either adding canonical tags on those url's or redirect them if they serve no purpose.

I also recommend reading the beginner's guide to SEO that should help you get started if you havent already read it.