Hi.

Marie is right in what she says regarding there being many possible reasons but my main guess is that you have either been hit by Panda or that your old site had better content.

Firstly I would say that if you have had a technical site audit carried out that it was either a poor quality one or that you haven't actioned the recommendations.

There are two full versions of your site on different domains:-

http://www.waytekwire.com
http://order.waytekwire.com

These domains mirror each other exactly and both home pages are claiming to be the canonical version.

The content is extremely thin and your site is pretty much an example of what the original penguin update was released to combat. This product for example has no description and no worthy content on the page - http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
This product is not alone on your site, most of your products have no descriptions.

Also your site is suffering from a common ecommerce issue of your products being viewable with or without a trailing slash and there is no canonical tag in the source to say which is the canonical version. i/e:-

http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-

Show the same content. in fact the same content is shown on all of these urls :-

http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-

As Marie says, there could  many possible reason for your ranking drop, my guess is that it is a combination of multiple reasons. Until you get the very basics sorted you are going to struggle in cracking this issue.

My best advice would be to pay for a really good site audit and follow through every recommendation. Failing that, sort out your site canonicalisation issues and give every single product a good description.

Really sorry for the bad news but hopefully it helps point you in the right direction.

All the best.
Ade.

Hi John,

First question is did you 301 redirect all of the old pages over to the new pages?

Did you change just the design or all of the content as well?

Did you switch platforms. i/e from one type of CMS to another.

Can you post the link to your site?

Cheers.

Ade.

Hi Atul,

It looks like 180 days is the total time google thinks it will take to index every single page on a site. With really big sites it may take close to that amount of time.

If you have links pointing to your old site that you are unable to get changed then I would retain the old site domain for ever. The small cost of re-registering the domain each year is worth it to keep on to your link juice.

Cheers.

Ade.

Hey Istvan,

Thanks for helping me out again.

I didn't even know about the 'Change of Address' tool.

I have just submitted the change of address and I will let you know if and how long the rankings take to switch over.

Thanks again mate, you're a legend!
Ade.

Hi,

I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect?

I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A.

I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:-

Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools.

It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search.

Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Ade.

Hello fellow Mozzers.

I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype.

All the have at the top of each page is

I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this.

Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation?

Thanks