Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,
Our site has experienced a huge organic traffic drop, specifically from Google. The drop occurred on Feb 19 and I've got no clue why it happened. We have not made any significant changes to the website and it doesn't look like there was an algorithm update last week.

We don't have any Google penalties or indexing issues noted, and the drop isn't specific to any particular segment/region/keyword.

What am I missing? Any advice or insight is super duper appreciated. Our site is a Wordpress/WooCommerice e-commerce site with a blog and long-standing #1 ranks for keywords related to our main product offering.

Thanks Alex; this is really helpful insight.  Lots to think about!  Thank you again - I sincerely appreciate it!

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your detailed response!  This is assuring.  To answer your question, we are keeping the same domain name but it would be hosted differently and supported differently than it currently is.

Definitely guilty of overthinking these things!  Ha.

This is really helpful and re-assuring.  Can you provide any insight on how this page consolidation would affect rankings?  Say we have our double-sided bookmark product page ranking on the first SERP for the query "customizable bookmarks".  With our migration and page consolidation, this product page will be redirected to a new bookmark page.  When Google crawls us next and sees we've redirected that page, it'll start displaying the new page in the SERPs in place of the old - in the same rank as the old page?  Is that correct?  And then that rank might drop if it seems that new page is not meeting searcher's needs in the way the old page was?

Just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that side of it.

Thanks again Alex - so so much!

Katie

Hello,

We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months.  We will be getting an entirely new website.  Many of our URLs will be changing:

Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here

So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this.

Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL.  In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly.  The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided  _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided  (call this URL B)

To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark  (call this URL C)

• What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value?  I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can.  We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can.
• (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site?  Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?)
• Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project?  This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make.

Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do.  I was able to find this discussion (https://moz.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time.

Thanks so much!