Fun and games -- not -- after website relaunch (Rails to Wordpress)
-
I'm after some advice. I've dropped 1 million pageviews in the last 30 days after a website relaunch a few weeks ago, and my revenue is a quarter of what it was, which is a massive worry. After 12 years of hard work and a much anticipated upgrade, it's been a nightmare.
There were so many problems with the changeover that should have been done, but I have been fixing the aftermath up like crazy since then and nothing seems to be improving.
I just want to know if there are any glaring issues I have missed that I can focus on. I have been working on ridiculous stuff like duplicate content from multiple imports (301 redirects and removing the dupes from google) and so much more. Feels like a bomb and I am stuck underneath it.
Website is BellyBelly.com.au.
Thanks in advance.
-
Yes, Wordpress SEO is the Yoast plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
-
Thanks again Plugin details in admin:
| WordPress SEOFAQ | Premium Support | Settings | Deactivate | Edit |
The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.
Version 2.0 | By Team Yoast | View details |
-
Thanks for the reply Richard.
I was worried about the redirects. I have that server issue where there are some URL chars in uppercase. So there is a redirect for that. There is also one to remove /articles/ which is what my site started with (a htaccess rule stopped it years ago), but it reappeared after the relaunch.
Something new from the redesign is the addition of the / at the end of URLs. I don't know why that happened. But I was very unhappy with my designer's job, hence why I have hired a new one to help clean it up.
CDN's shouldn't have changed with the move, but I had a suspicion something different had gone on.
Yes, links have been lost. I don't know why. With the conversion from rails to WP, three database syncs occurred, and I ended up with three copies of some articles. So I have been redirecting them as google is listing them all as 404's.
The site was much faster, but something has happened since launch that has slowed it down.
So much mess...
-
Everett,
Thanks for your reply! WP SEO is the Yoast plug-in, is it not?
Appreciate the list, will take a look.
Kelly
-
A lot of things happened here in combination. The new site launched. You say a disavow file was updated, was there a penalty or was this pre-emptive? You might have killed a lot of links that were helping you with this. Looks like you changed CDNs. The site was switched to secure, except for the forum, and a lot of the secure pages are displaying non-secure content? It looks like you added more ads to the site. You removed some urls in Google? You should really wait for the pages to switch naturally through the 301s to the new structure. What you may have done is deleted pages that would be showing right now while the new pages haven't been crawled and added yet. There are a ton of broken and redirected internal links after the new launch. Some old pages were never redirected and I would be willing to bet there were some links lost. Looking at a quick speed test on pingdom compared to the history, it looks like the site is taking twice as long to load now as it was before. There are some ridiculous redirect chains happening that need to be cleaned up. A lot of pages are redirected 2-5 times before reaching their current destinations.
One example:
http://bellybelly.com.au/articles/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game
http://bellybelly.com.au/articles/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/
http://bellybelly.com.au/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/
https://www.bellybelly.com.au/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/
https://www.bellybelly.com.au/breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/
I would start by just getting your site back in order. It looks like this was not a great launch and there is a ton of cleanup that needs to be done.
-
Hello Kelly,
If you feel like you need a professional SEO to come help you recover from a site migration / redesign then I'd say you're probably right. Moz keeps a recommended list of professionals here if you need help choosing one.
I agree with Chris that you should probably switch your SEO plug-in. I wouldn't use anything but Yoast for that, and it could solve a lot of your problems. Don't let that stop you from getting a professional audit though. You should make sure the contract also states that they will provide implementation if you're not comfortable implementing all of their recommendations yourself.
Good luck.
-
Oh, I know the feeling! I'd say, try to make an audit for the site, then make a priority list and take it step-by-step.
Let me know, if you need help.
-
Thanks Keszi,
The site has already launched, so it's all firefighting mode at the moment, lol!
-
Hey Chris!
Thanks for the reply. Yes I have WP SEO Premium installed After sleeping on it, I think I just need some professional SEO help here, I am at a loss. There are quite a few issues, I need to sort out a disavow file (amongst other things) and it seems too complicated and time consuming!
-
Hi Kelly,
I didn't see Yoast on your site and not sure if you are using another plugin to help manage SEO issues. Yoast is pretty well respected and the plugin can help manage some of the duplicate content issues in Word Press. (tags, categories)
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/Also some good reads on the Yoast site on optimizing a Word Press site. HTML5 and Schema should also be considered. There are some Word Press Gurus around here and hopefully they will chime in.
Best!
-
Hi Kelly,
There are a few nice articles about this topic. I will point out a few, maybe these checklists will help you determine what could have gone wrong with the redesign:
- http://searchengineland.com/8-necessary-seo-steps-during-a-website-redesign-65470
- http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seo-website-redesign-checklist/
- http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf
- http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2400414/checklist-launching-a-site-redesign
I hope it helps! Keszi
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
University website outbound links issue
Hi - I'm working on a university website and have found a load of (1) outbound links to companies that have commercial tie ups to the university and, beyond that, loads of (2) outbound links to companies set up by alumni and (3) outbound links to commercial clients of the university. Your opinions on whether I should nofollow these, or not, would be welcome. At the moment I'm tempted to nofollow (1) yet leave (2) and (3) - quite simply because the (1) backlinks may have been negotiated as part of a package (nobody can actually remember at the university!), yet (2) and (3) were freely given by the university. Your thoughts would be welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What is the best text font for health website
What is the good text font for health website, font size, inline spacing, character spacing etc.? Is there any study on it? what font looks to good to eyes? (on what font user stay for long time etc) I personally like apple website text font.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one? Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Wordpress or Joomla? Discussion
Hi All I'm about to start on a new project where I've been having lots of discussions with the developers involved on the merits of both wordpress and joomla. I'm experienced with wordpress but haven't really done too much with Joomla. I've found some general info on Joomla online, most issues seems to be around duplicate content, but can't seem to find too much else. Therefore I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion as I'd love to hear from those of you who have used both CMS's and the drawbacks/ pitfalls or plus points in both. The project is based around a non transactional site, offering a service, but no product. There's lots of thought leadership type content planned, either through interviews, surveys, articles, video etc, and some linkbait etc. Lot of content will also be newsworthy so keep Google news etc in the back of your mind too. Lots of social integration too... Looking forward to hearing what you might have to say Mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital1 -
Should I Combine 30 websites into one?
I have a Private health care company that I have just begun consulting for. Currently in addition to the main website serving the whole group, 30 individual sites which are for each of the hospitals in their group. Each has it's own domain. Each site, has practically identical content: something that will be addressed in my initial audits. But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own. This means thirty pages of content on "hip replacements" thirty different versions of "our treatement" etc, and bearing in mind they all run off the same CMS, even with different body text, the pages are going to be practically identical. It's a big call either way! The reason they started out with all these sites, is that each hospital is it's own cost centre and whilst the web development team is a centralized resource. They each have their own sites to try and rank indivdually for local searches, naturally as they will each tend to get customers from their own local area. Not every hospital provides the full range of treatments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod0 -
What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images
I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script. People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community. This is were the problems comes in. Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description. This leads to 2 things. no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about. Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam. Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same. Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0