Rankings Tanked After Redesign
-
This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience.
Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure.
Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms.
I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible.
Now I have no idea where to even begin. Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%!
Any insight is very, very much appreciated.
-
Thanks @iPullRank. There are so many moving parts here and we have decided it is just beyond our understanding to get this fixed. We've decided to work with the folks at Portent Interactive to start a long term fix. Thank you, everyone, for your feedback and assistance. If there is one thing I've learned it's that we need to be working with trustworthy folks like those within the Moz community.
-
Hey Josh,
I'm leery of the "301 redirect add-on" and that would be the first thing that I double-check. I'd pull all of the links that you guys have run all the link targets through a web crawler such as Screaming Frog to make sure that they aren't your 404s. My main concern is that your link equity has not been maintained.
I'd also look at the quality of the links as was mentioned later in this thread, then I'd start looking at whether your content is what we'd consider thin.
There's a lot of moving parts here, but without more information on the site I can't give you a more definitive answer.
-
well apparently it did end up hurting. There are ways to make it optimized for keywords while still retaining it's humanity. An SEO person would/should be good at this. If you want to learn and do it yourself, you totally can. Honestly, it's a full-time job. So I would probably hire it out if I were you.
But it's up to you of course.
-
Thank you everyone for your response. So as a manufacturer, I am far from an SEO guy. Would it behoove me to go with an expert to review?
Additionally, as far as SEO companies, we didn't switch, we just quit using. We used one that I thought was top-shelf, but they did many blackhat techniques and actually hurt our rankings during the one Google update - this was in 2011. Rankings improved after we quit using them.
I think the content on the new site is good. The old site had tons of keyword stuffing, so we cleaned up our descriptions so they read more human-like.
-
Basically I'd add to the already helpful comments here by saying - is it possible the redesign has bad content? Have you researched keyword density and on-site optimization for the keywords you are targeting? Using a tool like ranks.nl, figure out what changed in this regard.. Surely you have backups of the old site to compare to but if not use the Wayback machine.
It might be completely focused on the site's new content and have nothing at all to do with redirection or link juice. That would be my first guess, but as everyone has said it could be any number of things or all of the above.
-
404's won't harm rankings, as long as it is a properly formatted 404. Did you change SEO companies as well? the reason I ask is that it might be more than just the redesign, it may be the links they are building.
-
Hi Joshua,
There are so many potential causes for your problem.
Take a look at this post.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/42824/
I would also check your canonical tags. Sometimes during redesigns on platforms they get left and ignored. I've also seen quite a few issues with mega menu type designs and no follow links. The list is kinda endless.
Try not to generate 404's for old products. They could be carrying links, try and redirect them or keep them if you plan on getting them back in stock. If the company didn't suggest doing that with products then I would also consider seeking out some consulting.
Rgds
Kyle
-
Hi Bryan:
I did submit the new sitemap to Google and all the pages appear to be indexed, they are just ranking way, way lower.
I did notice there are a lot of 404's listed in webmaster tools, but a lot of those are from old products we discontinued. The design company told me those won't hurt anything, but I am not sure.
-
Hello Joshua,
Did you let Google know in your webmaster tools?
Did you submit a new sitemap to Google?
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
-
Ranking of non-homepage leads to decrease in website ranking?
Hi all, Google picks up a non-homepage to rank for primary keyword where homepage is actually optimised to rank for same keyword. This means Google is ignoring the actual page and ranking other page. Does this scenario means that we are ranking lower as the homepage is not considered here? We may rank much better if homepage is preferred by Google? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Can a cloud based firewall affect my search ranking?
Hi, I recently implemented a firewall on my website to prevent hacking attacks. We were getting a crazy amount of people per day trying to brute force our website. I used the sucuri cloud proxy firewall service which they claim because of the super fast caching actually helps SEO. I was just wondering is this true? Because we're slowly falling further and further down the SERPS and i really don't know why. If not, is there any major google update recently I don't know about? Thanks, Robert
Web Design | | BearPaw880 -
New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
Hi guys, I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work. Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position? Apperciate any advice around this Thanks
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash
Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn0 -
After a website redesign, what is the impact and is it a good practice to use /v2/ naming convention?
Hi mightyful SEOMoz community. We just launched a redesign of our commercial website from https://www.data-field.com to https://www.data-field.com/v2/ All URLs from previous website were 301 permanent redirect to the appropriate page in the new website, and the root domains ( /, /v2/ ) send the users to their own language content /v2/en/, /v2/fr/, /v2/zh/ Up to here everything is fine. But then I setup the usual "Share" buttons, only to find that they were displaying a "0" count. Then I realized that it was because of the root URL change from / to /v2/ My question is the following: 1. Is using /v2/ a good practice? 2. If yes, then should I link the Social tool to https://www.data-field.com/ ( only ) instead of linking it to the actual page in the address bar? Thanks for your answers.
Web Design | | NicolasE0 -
Rankings disappears for two days
We have noticed with 3 of my sites that rankings totally disappears for 2-3 days and then appear again on google 1st page. Why does this happen?
Web Design | | getpromoted0 -
Redesign of an ecommerce site
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want. We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities. We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews. We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes. All content title, headings remain same. Any suggestions are welcome 🙂
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
How would restructuring the navigation of my website affect my rankings?
I want to restructure the navigation of my website for a few reasons: 1. It isn't intuitive/clear to the user 2. It is way too big, it has too many links and thus causes the number of links on many pages to be >100. 3. I want to get rid of file extensions as part of the URLs (.html, .php) 4. I want to achieve a "tree"-like navigation system, with categories, subcategories and so on. In the process of cleaning up my website, I had to 301 redirect a lot of duplicate pages, fix broken links, etc. I have a lot of 301 redirects already, and in the process of restructuring the navigation of my website I know I'm going to get more. Will the addition of new 301 redirects have an effect on my rankings? (I'm basically going to be changing all of the URLs) What kind of SEO effect will restructuring the navigation at the top of the page (reducing the # of links on the main menu) have on my site? What is the best strategy to implement in this situation?
Web Design | | deuce1s0