There were some changes in the footer links. All the content pages were imported pretty much as they were before. We took care to make the main navigation menu as close to the prior site as possible, but there might have been some differences. Of course, because of the way WordPress handles tags, categories and page/post structure, I am sure the internal linking was probably altered somewhat, but it was mostly unintentional.
Posts made by bizmanuals
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RE: Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
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RE: Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Kurt, for most part, the redirects were set up for every page (product -> product, category -> category, old shop main page to the new shop main page etc). There were some fringe pages (like /help_options.asp?ID=9) that were sent to the corresponding parent page (frequently-asked-questions). Also, previous pages with query strings (like ReviewsList.asp?SortBy=Newest&Page=1&ProductCode= or BulkDiscounts.asp?ProductID=28&ProductCode=) were sent to the new shop main page.
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RE: Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
We were using a Volusion shopping cart, which required a sub domain. We did not have any known problems. The move allowed us to consolidate everything into a single CMS (Wordpress).
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Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages.
We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic.
Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.