New URL structure caused a HUGE drop?
-
I have started working with a client who did an upgrade on their e-commerce sive in May of last year. It totally changed the URL structure and they didn't redirect old URLs or do any of the things they should have. Not unexpectedly they they went from about 300 visitors a day to 0 for then rose up to maybe 50 and have remained there ever since.
There were some major onsite issues including about 15000 internal links that 302 back to the site. In any case I have fixed most of the onsite problems and worked on a little better categorization + content optimization, etc.
We have only been working on this for about 30 days and organic traffic is up and they are ranking for much better keywords, but I expected a little quicker rise.
Here is a screenshot out of GA of their descent. Its pretty rapid.
I dont think it makes sense to redirect their old URLs at this point since most of them have been deindexed for 10+ months. Anyone have any suggestions on how to get back to their previous level. The domain actually has decent authority and link profile, etc.
Is this just going to be a slow climb back? Any thoughts?
-
And along the same lines, there wasn't a rogue line of code that set the canonical URL for all of your products to the home page or added a noindex to your pages, right?
-
Roger, here's a new post about the changes in the Q&A system http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pro-qa-forum-upgrades-changes.
-
Interesting point. The old URL structure isn't entirely clear to me is though, so it would take some real digging to apply all the old urls.
I guess its worth a shot.
Whats up with the new having to remember to thumbs up your own posts by the way????
-
Adding to Seth's response - not only do I agree with him completely, the other factor is how many potential visitors still, to this day, click on those old links only to get 404'd?
-
I would disagree with you on the redirection of the old site URLs. I have worked on and consulted with several eCommerce websites and from 2004-2008 ran my own successful eCommerce site called thesprintstore.net. I changed the URL structure and had the same thing happen to my site. At the time I chalked the issue up to moving everything around and believed that the site would eventually bounce back. Due to the economy it never did.
I later discovered that the old URL structure had some seriously powerful backlinks from sites like techcrunch, engaget, engagetmobile and other awesome forums. If I had only redirected all of the old urls to the new urls all of that link juice would have continued onto my site and I would not have experienced such a significant drop in domain and page authority.
Regardless of indexation or how long ago the urls were changed its never a good strategy to play hide and seek with Google so simply apply 301 redirects from the old to the new and see what transpires over the coming months. After all, it cant hurt right?
-
Hmm, that is an interesting thought. It is automatically added by X-Cart, but I will do some spot checking to make sure.
-
A quick question first -- you've verified that Google Analytics code is on all of their current pages, right? Discovering way later there was a glitch in code implementation and half of their URLs don't have GA code would be a major headache, as would finding that a good part of the dip was because they finally pulled the code off of the development server. I've seen both happen.
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
-
Hey all -- ever seen a client with URLs that keep repeating the domain? Something like: client.com/client.com/client.com/subfolder-name. Any idea what glitch could cause that?
Hey all -- ever seen a client with URLs that keep repeating the domain? Something like: client.com/client.com/client.com/subfolder-name. Any idea what glitch could cause that?
Technical SEO | | TDC_SEO0 -
URL / sitemap structure for support pages
I am creating a site that has four categories housed in folders off of the TLD. Example: example.com/category-1
Technical SEO | | InterCall
example.com/category-2
example.com/category-3
example.com/category-4 Those category folders contain sub-folders that house the products inside each category. Example: example.com/category-1/product-1
example.com/category-2/product-1
etc. Each of the products have a corresponding support page with technical information, FAQs, etc. I have three options as to how to structure the support pages' URLs. Option 1 - Add new sub-folder with "support" added to string: example.com/category-1/product-1-support Option 2 - Add a second sub-folder off of the product sub-folder for support: example.com/category-1/product-1/support Option 3 - Create a "support" folder with product sub-folders: example.com/support/product-1 Which of these three options would you choose? I don't like having one large /support folder that houses all products. It seems like this would create a strange crawling and UX situation. The sitemap would have a huge /support folder with all of my products in it and the keywords in my category folders would be replaced with the word "support." Because I would rather have the main product pages ranking over any of the support pages (outside of searches containing the word "support"), I am leaning toward Option 2: example.com/category-1/product-1/support. I think this structure indicates to crawlers that the more important page is the product page, while the support page is secondary to that. It also makes it clear to users that this is the support page for that particular product. Does anyone have any experience or perspective on this? I'm open to suggestions and if I'm overthinking it, tell me that too. Thanks, team.0 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
Prospective new client it by webspam looking for new resource
Background:
Technical SEO | | tcmktg
Prospective client recently hit by webspam update. (I have verified hundreds of low-quality links, porn links, backlink exchanges etc.) They want us to step in and remove bad links and start over. Question:
What is the best way to examine all the links to determine which need to be removed? We can create the report from open site, but how can we identify the bad links? Here are the site metrics. 5000+ linking domains, so in this example we need to research the 5000 links, and possibly send notifications to thousands of webmasters to remove the links? Open site states about 25,000 total links, but root links are shown below. Yikes. Domain Authority 75
External Followed Links 112,000
Total External Links 115,000
Total Links 150,000,
Followed Linking Root Domains 3,900
Total Linking Root Domains 5,300
Linking C Blocks 2,7000 -
Changing the URL structure will it help me or hurt me?
I got handed a website running on Joomla without the SEO friendly URL check box selected so our URLs all look like this www.rotaryvalve.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&Itemid=37 . I am hoping to rework this website in the near future here and plan on changing the URL structure across the website so there are some actual keywords in the URL. When I did this I was thinking of just doing 301 redirects to the new pages and hopefully the hit from the search engines wouldn't be too bad. Can anyone speak from experience as to what the best way to go about doing this would be so I don't end up falling back ranking wise. Would change the URLs end up helping me or hurting me? Thanks
Technical SEO | | wmwmeyer0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0