What is wrong with my once highly ranked site?

[tutugirl]

Hello,

I'm really desperate for some help.  I believe I've been hit by Panda as traffic started diminishing late March for my 6 year old website.  I've never had a sharp drop, only gradual.  I've lost a load traffic since then.  I did change shopping carts in June since I had a a canonical issue from my old cart that couldn't be corrected.  The old cart also did not allow me to have unique product titles and the urls were garbled with letters, numbers, etc...   I know Panda did not like that.

I've made several changes (cleaned up broken links, added more content to my site, added Disallow: /search/  and Disallow: /search to my robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content from my search box.)

My most prized keywords (tutu and tutus) are on page 15 or so of Google now, when they used to be on page 1 or 2 at the worst.  Other good ones are slipping too.

I do need to hire an SEO to optimize my titles eventually as I believe my they are still a bit stuffed but before I do that, I am just trying to get the other stuff done first.

My main questions are this... Do any of you see something else that looks bad to you in the eyes of Google?  I'd love the cold, hard truth as I'm pretty desperate for my site to recover, if at all possible.

Thank you in advance!

Here is my site:   http://alturl.com/mvmux

[tutugirl]

I have a question for someone about blogs.  I have two - one on my website and one at Wordpress.  How long are blog posts supposed to be and is it okay to have links pointing from my WP blog to my website?  I'm not sure how that looks in the eyes of Panda.

[CHADHARRIS]

Tutu Girl-

I dipped for about 45 days.  During that time, I worked night and day posting, blogging, etc.  I went and found all our old blog post and relinked them to new urls ( that's the day I realized that 301's would be to much to handle( had 6800 of them at one point)

Cleaning the architecture is more important that anything you can do-( in my very educated opinion ( educated by doing and getting results)

Think about the search engine as ADDHD teenagers- if you give them a reason to get distracted- they will go somewhere else.  I also learned a few things for some really smart people.  Namely- Jason Dowdell( seotool).  He taught me about using Jquery to reduce number of links, placement of content ( no lower than code line 40) as well as a ton of other things.

Basically the lesson that I learned- make the switch.  Get the architecture in place, then content, then begin doing seo work then sales will fall into place.  Not focusing on the architecture will lead to lack lust performance down the road.  Aslo, develop a system for adding content, spinning social and blogging which will also help.

Hope the helps- it's a lot of work but work- but so is opening a retail store( which is what an online store really is( just bigger market of customers)

Chad

[tutugirl]

Chad - how long was your dip?

[CHADHARRIS]

Hey GreatFence-

I own TheGardenGates.com and did a complete replatform ( leaving volusion too) I timed my relaunch at the slowest time and had a dip.  I did do 301's but later basically just plug the plug on everything.  Then we added an incredible about of content-

the results have been incredible and our sales our up 500% from Volusion.

Good Luck

Chad

[danatanseo]

You are definitely headed down the right path. I know from experience with 3DCart that they have just started offering SEO services. I would advise to steer clear  of them. If you've had any experience with their customer service, it's, well, marginal.

I attended their kick-off webinar for their SEO services and they were still talking about populating meta keywords tags. I posted a question asking them when they were going to make it possible to do SEO on their .asp pages [which you currently cannot access at all] and they did not respond. There are similar built-in problems with SEO for their blog.

I would advise hiring an SEO that specializes in E-commerce who has had a lot of experience with 3DCart. I'll still take a look at the site on Monday. There may be a lot of things you can do yourself without the expense of hiring someone.

[danatanseo]

Excellent comments Ryan. I believe part of the challenge here will be working within the confines of 3DCart. I had the same problems with Volusion. These E-Commerce solutions are not necessarily coded with SEO in mind at all. I liked the way Volusion's back end was organized much better than 3DCart's. In 3DCart everything is broken into pieces and not organized very well. Trying to put in javascript for certain additional features can be difficult or impossible because one cannot access the right parts of certain pages (i.e. one cannot directly access the whole code of a product page to place snippets in the ). I've also had several times where javascripts from PowerReviws, Bizrate and AddShopper broke the shopping cart altogether.

If I'd had a choice I would have built my newest e-commerce site in Volusion. However,, Volusion does not have sophistacted enough taxation capabilities and the company had nexus in California, Washington and Idaho. We were forced to choose 3DCart because it was the least expensive option that integrated with Avalara, a 3rd party tax calculation service.

[tutugirl]

Thanks for adding that, Ryan.  You offered me great info.  

I believe the 404 and 301 redirect errors are corrected for the most part.  In regard to the 301 errors, all is fixed except I am still left with redirects to my chat server, view cart links, and "add this" share for my social buttons. Is this something I can block in robots.txt?

I'm also working to adding more content to my site.  Basically, I'm trying to do the most possible on the back end of 3dcart with my current design (don't want to move over to Wordpress) before I hire an SEO to help further. I also enabled the mobile device too.

Sincerely,

Angela

[RyanKent]

Dana, I agree with your feedback. In case it helps I will share part of a conversation I had with Angela last week.

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Your site is full of coding errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=tutugirl.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0) which may affect a search engine's ability to crawl your site or how the site appears on various devices. There are over 1000 404 errors on your site, over 15k 301 redirects on your site, coding errors, no mobile site, image issues, etc. I am not suggesting your site is not beautiful but the site architecture has so many issues your site rankings and user experience are negatively impacted. I can only guess you designed the site using a template, in which case I would recommend you work with a professional developer on a site redesign. I hate to share bad news with good people but I can only tell you what I see as I examine your site. You offer a beautiful and very cute product which is handmade and clearly has a solid place in the market.

[tutugirl]

Thanks Dana!  just emailed you.

[danatanseo]

Hi Great Fence,

I am only speaking from experience. I am not saying there will definitely be a dip. I am saying that anyone who is replatforming, particularly if they are re-writing URLs, they need to be prepared for a dip Perhaps it has to do with changing servers where your site is located (if I was Google, that would be a significant part of the equation).

There are no guarantees for sites one way or the other.

As a SEO who specializes in e-commerce I just want to make people aware that re-platforming might now solve all of your SEO woes overnight. You have to be patient.

Great Fence...if that 3-month dip led to double the traffic and conversions that you had before you re-platformed then it would all be worth it wouldn't it?

Some platforms are definitely better than others, but you need to be prepared to sacrifice a little and wait out the dip. If you've researched your choice well enough and made it taking into consideration your overall business goals, you should be fine.

I know that's not 100% reassuring, but if your business model is solid and your [products are good, you should be okay.

Dana

[GreatFence]

Dana, so are you saying there's no way of getting around a dip when you rebuild a new site on a new platform.  For example, my site is currently on an .aspx shared server with a well known company similar to Volusion.  However, we are rebuilding the site in pHp MySql via a more powerful open source platform which will be on a dedicated server.

Can't we set redirects within Google webmaster so that there is no "dip."  There's got to be a way to minimize "the switch" when we do finally go LIVE later this year so that there is no 3 month (or longer) dip.  That's very disturbing.

Have you researched this thoroughly?

[danatanseo]

Hi Angela,

What are you seeing in your Google Webmaster Tools reports? 3dcart does have some unique SEO problems, but nothing that should be affecting you to this extent.

For example, you can't SEO 3DCArt's .asp pages nor can you properly SEO any blog posts.

However, I have a niche site on 3DCart that is doing quite well.

Your site is adorable and clearly unique.

I would be happy to take a look at it if you are willing to grant me view rights to your 3dcart backend I can tell you how to do that if you'd like, No charge. I just really like your site and would love to see you get back to where you were.

Please feel free to private message me or drop me an email at dtan@ccisolutions.com

[tutugirl]

Hi Dana,

Thanks so much for your quick reply!  I switched carts on June 15 and 301 redirected old URL to new URL.  That part was definitely done correctly.

I moved from wahmshoppes.com to 3dcart.

Here is my sister site that my site USED to be on over at wahmshoppopes.com   I've pretty much ignored it and doesn't generate much traffic, but I still keep it running.  It shows a perfect example how my old product URLs used to look:  http://alturl.com/z2g6w

The scary part is that I'm still dropping down.  I know something is terribly wrong and it's so upsetting because my site used to generate so much traffic and pretty much dominated my competition.  

Angela

[danatanseo]

First of all, I'd like to say, your sight is completely adorable!

Okay, that being said, I have a lot of experience in E-commerce. What platform were you on and what platform did you change to? Were there any changes is the URLs of your site? Did you do 301-redirects? Do you know for sure those 301-redirects were done properly?

I moved a very large site (5,000 SKUs) from self-hosting to Volusion in 2008. We had good traffic up to that point and then, for the first 3 months after we re-platformed everything tanked. But what happened next was quite remarkable. Our traffic skyrocketed and our conversion rate did the same.

Sites replatforming have to prepare themselves for a major "dip." But what happens after the dip could be really worth it. I know it's scary, but it could be that you are experiencing the "dip."

I am interested to know what e-commerce platform you were on and what you are on now. They allhave their own SEO challenges.  I have a lot of experience with Volusion and 3Dcart and some experience with Magento. I'll be interested to know where you were and where you are now. Cheers!

Dana