Need Help - Lost 75% Of Traffic Since May 2018

[vetofunk]

Sorry to go in-depth here, but want to give all available information.

We went live late April 2018 with our two websites in Shopify (moved from Magento, same admin, different storeviews...which we find later to cause some issues). Both of these websites sell close to the same products (we purchased a competitor about 5 years ago, which is why we have two). The nice thing is that they do almost identical amounts in sales. They have done very well for years, especially in the last two years.

Well, the core algo update around May 22nd-24th 2018 happened and wiped out about 65% of our Google traffic for one website (MySupplementStore.com). And this latest update, wiped out another 20%. I couldn't figure out why this would have happened, because we were very cautious about keeping things separate, unique descriptions etc. So I did some digging and this is what I found:

• The reviews we migrated over from Magento somehow were combined and added to both websites. This is something I didn't notice. I had this resolved a month ago so that each site's reviews are now only on that website.
• Our blog section was duplicated across both websites during the migration. Again, something I didn't notice, as we have close to over 1,000 blog posts per site. This was resolved two weeks ago.
• As I was looking more, I found that the last 6 months, a person working for us (for 3 years), started writing descriptions and pasting them on both websites, instead of making them unique to each website. I trusted her for years, but I think she just got lazy. She quit about a month before the migration as well. We are currently working on this, but its been taking awhile because we have over 5,000 products on each site and have no idea which ones are duplicates.

I did also notice:

• Site very slow when checking site speed tools. Working on that this week.
• When I take snippets of text or do searches, many times it shows up in omitted results.
• No messages in Google Webmaster Tools

So the question is...

1. Do you think it is the duplicate content issues that caused the drop? Our other site is Best Price Nutrition, which didn't see a big drop at all during that update. If not, any other ideas why?

[vetofunk]

Hi Tyler - Thanks for the response. I definitely know what you are saying. When we purchased this competitor, it was many different products (over 10 years ago) and gradually we added our products. This site normally does a couple million US each year, which is why redirecting it wasn't even something we thought about, and don't want to think about...and for almost 10 years everything was fine.

I focused on unique descriptions, we had unique reviews and unique QA, all user generated...different for each of the two sites. But as I mentioned above, some issues happened during our migration, and with a former employee.

I want to get it back to where it was, which I believe is possible. I guess I am wanting to see if anyone sees any other potential issues too.

[TylerReardon]

Hey Jeff,

Just out of curiosity, why haven't you redirected one site to the other? Why have two sites in the first place? If these stores sell close to the same products, there is no sense in maintaining both of them. It just opens you up to issues like the ones you've described. You're literally competing with yourself for rankings on two different sites when you could most likely rank better with one site. Seeing as you've lost 75% of traffic, this seems like the perfect time to do that.

There are just so many benefits in terms of SEO and even resources. You're likely splitting your time in half trying to get each of these sites to rank which means all projects take twice as long as they should. Additionally, think of it in terms of domain authority/page authority. You have links split up to both sites right now, one might have more links for one category page than the other and that one might have more links to another category page than the other one. If you combine these sites and 301 redirect all the URLs from one site to the other, you'll combine the value of all of those links.

You can run yourself ragged trying to figure out what happened in a "broad core algorithm update" but the truth is, you'll never know. Your best bet is asking yourself what the risks are to having two sites to manage and, conversely, what are the benefits? Is it best to try and restore rankings to one site while neglecting the other or are you better off just combining your efforts?

In regards to the things you mentioned: Yes, the duplicate meta titles and descriptions could hurt you. They might make you look like you're scraping the other site which is something Google tries to penalize algorithmically. I would measure the results of those changes closely for the next couple months.

I'd also do a deep dive on page speed as Google made mobile page speed a ranking factor beginning on July 9th.

Hope this helps.
-Tyler