Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
-
Hello Fellow Forum Members:
Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this.
- Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings.
- By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site.
- As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%.
- Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently.
- In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with.
- By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more.
- Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best.
So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform?
We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
-
I will try that. Thank you Erik for your input.
-
Reach out to Volusion...I suspect they'll have all that data since it has only been 10 days. It will cost you but at least you could prove your theory.
-
You're correct Erik. The only backup I did of my Volusion site was the customers, products and sale reports. My Volusion account was closed on 6/15 so that restore is not an option.
I also understand what you're saying about yet another move and the issues that could come with that. You've given me a lot to think about here. Thank you.
-
In my opinion, no. Moving to another platform puts you another iteration away from the original solution. If you do move and things don't get better then what? You'll have double the 301's to address.
My recommendation would be to restore your store back to Volusion to verify your conclusions but I suspect you 1) did not make a full backup of your store's data and data files; and 2) you did not keep your Volusion store active (no-indexed and not attached to your domain) until you were sure everything was in proper order.
Don't forget that the Volusion Product Name Short field serves two purposes: one, as the URL and two, as the anchor text on your category pages (which directly affects your internal link structure). It could be due to your breadcrumbs as Volusion takes the primary category of your site and uses it as the breadcrumb. I'm not sure how that got transferred over either.
I think your BC store is salvageable but not without fully investigating the issues via your store and your analytics...as well as your back link profile. For all we know it could simply be the latest Google updates.
-
Thank you Erik, I understand what you are saying. These are things I did not know which is why I had hired the company to handle the migration. They came highly recommended from BC and I trusted that they would do this stuff all the time. I make equipment for dogs, which I am good at. I know that I know nothing about full website migrations, but I believed a trusted BC partner would.
The 269 in my example was the Volusion category ID, not the SKU.
Identifying these things in Analytics is not what I would call easy for me. I can tell I am going to have to learn a lot more about this subject if I want to understand things which is why I joined this community. The first order of business is to get our site back where it was. Does it sound to you like it can be addressed on the current platform?
-
www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html could be more powerful than www.website.com/myproduct/ but it could also be weaker. You've added in the category name which may be redundant (I'm not sure without more information) and you've weakened the power of "myproduct" brought to your SEO. Plus, you have now removed the 269 which for most people is the manufacturer's SKU or UPC code which many people search.
If a lot of your traffic was SKU-related (which you can easily find in your analytics), then you definitely took a step backwards instead of forwards.
Yes, BC gives you much greater flexibility and power with your URLs, but you need to carefully evaluate how to use that power and really understand your current traffic and its origins.
-
Thank you Erik for the reply. I switched the URLs based on the recommendation that the BC URLs were much more user friendly. For example www.website.com/myproduct/ was better than www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html.
I feel we're missing something too!
-
Curious why you didn't keep your current Volusion URLs? With BigCommerce (which we are a partner), you can match the Volusion URL and forego the 301 redirect if you feel that's critical to your SEO success. A proper 301 redirect should be adequate and not account for such a dramatic drop of traffic.
As an ecommerce consultant you need to understand where your traffic was coming from and make sure that's protected when you move. For example, if your products have a lot of Facebook Likes, when you change the URL, you will lose 100% of those Likes...and this should be a factor in choosing a new platform.
You should be able to diagnose what's happening from your Google Analytics. Take a look at where traffic has dropped. What landing pages were driving traffic before and no longer are? What keywords have disappeared and what pages were appearing for those keywords? Are those pages 301'd correctly? What products and categories were driving your traffic and revenue?
Obviously check all your pages for proper meta tags (INDEX, FOLLOW)...with these "simple" platforms, it is easy to accidentally make your whole store disappear.
It sounds to me like something was missed during the migration and you're now. We are a top Volusion consulting firm and have worked on hundreds of stores...and we're partners of both BigCommerce and 3dcart. You can have a successful store on a hosted platform. Having PHP access is not critical to your success. Yes, it can help but you migrated from Volusion which has much more restrictions than BigCommerce (in terms of what you can accomplish from a template perspective and SEO)...so I feel we're missing something here.
-
It was supposed to be every page and I was charged $600+ just for the redirecting part of the process separate and part from the design.
-
Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.
-
You may be in need of a second opinion.
-
You can see why I'm so confused!
-
You are absolutely correct. A different platform, but a hosted one nonetheless.
-
Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.
-
Our developer and SEO are different folks and my relationship with each of them is completely independent from the other. Great question though.
-
Yes, we were. Page 1, between position 3 and 7 on our main niche keywords.
-
Also, is your developer and SEO the same?
Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.
-
Were you ranking well prior to the move?
-
Definitely a possible reason as you are already losing traffic from it already. Something you should look at ASAP. Those pages should be redirecting to the correct, new pages so I'm wondering why they werent properly 301'ed. Was the 301 service only sending your previous homepage to the new homepage and not per page? (Or even old pages to the new homepage)
-
I have not. I will mention that to our developer and see if she's heard of it.
-
Thanks for the response. I'm only going off some of the things we were told to implement that we can't because that code is off limits. Can't implement canonical tags on home page, can't get rid of the https versions of all pages (home page, product pages, etc), can't put the blog on the root domain, etc. It sounded like a big deal to me, but SEO and coding is not what I do, so I really wouldn't know any better.
-
Thanks Dennis. Our SEO found quite a few pages that had good ranking that are now returning 404s. Is that what you mean by the the 301 being to blame?
-
Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?
-
Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...
-
The reasoning, as I understand it, is that the hosted solutions will never give you complete control over coding.
Their input was this: You are going to want to stay away from hosted solutions if you want to have full control over your site and experience. So we would recommend against going with something like this, for instance.
-
When we handle big sites like this, there are a lot of possible problems that we face, some of which are
- the traditional ecommerce problem of "unique content" - maybe generic content or copied from a supplier (not saying you are doing this, Im just putting it out there)
- another traditional problem with category pages and it's contents
These 2 could affect rankings. Honestly, 404's dont matter much for us unless it's a vital part of the site, not on any pages of the site or if it had a lot of links pointing to it previously
if it's worthless, we just let them die, so GWT can stop bugging us with it by next year lol.
The 301 is actually the first thing that could be blamed as it might not be able to pass the same juice as it could before all the algo updates. You could try restoring the old site on a new CMS that you choose and run this side by side but it might be too much trouble.
-
Why are they giving you that suggestion? What is their reasoning?
-
We were looking at the Magento Community Edition, although I know we'll still have development costs.
The recommendation I've been given was to stay away from all hosted cart solutions: Volusion, Bigcommerce, 3dCart, Shopify, etc.
-
If you're trying to keep your business alive, Magento may be pricey for you.
Have you looked at 3dCart?
-
I would lean towards Magento for similar reasons to what Dennis said already. Also I just have had poor Wordpress experiences and feel like Google is out to get 'em. That last part is all in my head and completely made up but that's enough to sway me towards Magento.
-
Thank you Jesse for your response. Yes, our PPC campaigns have been what has been keeping us afloat. We have managed to keep our business alive, albeit in a much more expensive way.
When you say bite the bullet and rebuild, do you feel the Wordpress option or Magento option is a better place to begin research?
-
maybe (maybe) sharing the URL will help..? hard to say, really, what the problem is.
-
I agree with Dennis. Sounds like it's time to bite the bullet and re-build. Take it as a lesson and move on.
In the meantime, have you considered driving in traffic through a PPC campaign? Might stop the bleeding..
-
Thanks Dennis.
The links mostly pointed to our home page and some of our main category pages, so those did redirect accordingly. We also saw a slight decline in during the Google updates, but had recovered most of the way from those. In GA, it is easy to see the traffic drop begins when our redesign launched.
You said, "If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it.". To be honest, that's what we can't figure out. Did the lack of comprehensive 301's which caused a lot of 404's cause this, or our platform choice. That's what we don't know but are trying to figure out before we make a big move.
Our product catalog is probably around 600+ products right now but will be heading into the thousands by year's end.
Don't know if this response helps at all or not.
-
Have you continued link building work on the current domain ever since you 301'ed it? It's really a tricky situation. It could be due to old links on the original domain (especially after penguin in may and the monthly pandas)
If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it. Magento is actually pretty seo friendly and since you have a dev, then it's even easier. I would not recommend wordpress for big ecommerce sites so it will depend on your site's size.
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
-
Competitor's new site ranking with out much keywords - How?
Hi all, One of our competitors have recently redesigned their website with new content. Now I can see much less keywords in the content. And page title also changed away from keywords. Still this is ranking at good position. How? Previously they used to have much landing pages with related keywords which some of them are missing now. Still I wonder why this website is ranking high? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Large Global Site Structure
Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network. I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin. So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee? Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take. Thanks Moz Community
Web Design | | SeoSheikh0 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 🙂 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Domain is now just a localized wordpress site.
Many errors from previous ecommerce site. Do I need to redirect every single page that no longer exists at this domain? loveyourcabinets.com used to be loveyourkitchenandbath.com but we have since changed course. We want loveyourkitchenandbath.com to be our local site on Long Island and NYC. Loveyourcabinets.com will be an ecommerce project that I'll be revamping in the coming months. I think Moz as well as Google still has all of the old ecommerce pages indexed. And of course, Moz is shooting me a bunch of error all regarding pages from the ecommerce site that used to be on loveyourkitchenandbath.com. Any thoughts? Commentary? Thx
Web Design | | loveyourkitchen0 -
Using content from other sites without duplicate content penalties?
Hi there, I am setting up a website, where i believe it would substantially benefit users experience if i setup a database of information on artists. I am torn because to feasibly do this correctly, i would have content that is built from multiple sources, but has no real unique content. It would have parts from Wikipedia, parts from other websites etc. All would be sourced of-course. My concern is that if i do this, am i risking in devaluing my website because of this. Is there a way i can handle this without taking a hit?
Web Design | | BorisD0 -
What Is Our Site Missing Causing Our Former Dominance To Slip?
So we have operated one of our retail sites, BonitaJ.com for many years now. Through a lot of work, link building and optimizing around 2009, we were in a prominent spot on the 1st page in google for just about every main term we were targeting. Towards the end of 2009, nearing December or so, we started slipping here and there, and began being displaced for our main terms by newer sites that according to several factors, don't have near the strength our site holds. And by strength, I simply mean, based on link volume, mozbar stats and many other factors, it seems we should rank well above most, but still find ourselves just hanging to 8-10 positions on page one, and in many cases somewhere on page two for terms it seems like we should be in the top 5 positions for. I believe some of our slippage is due to google's devaluing of many of our incoming links. We achieved our early ranking dominence off a lot of directory links and things like that over time, but ever since 2009 when links began getting devalued we immediately broke into getting quality blog links via LEGIT blog relationships where we'd offer up contests, bloggers would review our products and so on, and these relationships continue through today. We also do a lot of guest blog writing, article postings on various networks, as well as press releases, all with the goal of keeping our link profile happy and healthy. So we still have work to do there, but we're on the right track. So my thought is that to get back over the hump, we simply need to continue with the legit link building methods, but I'm also thinking that maybe we need to improve some things navigationally. Things I was hoping people would chime in on are.... 1. If we're mainly trying to target bridal/wedding related jewelry terms, should we ditch the "Jewelry Sets, Pearl Jewelry & Swarovski Crystal Jewerly" terms from our main navbar. They are featured inside each of the categories, and in the end, we don't rank or pull traffic for them anyway. Would ditching them from the main nav, help pass more juice from home page and other pages to the pages that better target our niche? 2. A while back, we ditched including actual product on each of the main category pages. I'm leaning towards breaking the main category pages up into sections, for instance once on the "Bridal Jewelry" page, it would list each of the sub-cats, with a 5-10 product sampling of the most popular items, with a link that says "view all necklaces" at the end of each sub-section. Do you think that more wise than just trying to direct them into the sub-cats with no actual product offering? 3. Anything else you see glaringly wrong with what we're trying to do? This site is just on the edge of blowing up from a ranking perspective if I can just get some confirmation on some things that I know I should do, but I'm wary due to fear of screwing things up. If I can get some solid feedback, the rest is history.
Web Design | | AarcMediaGroup0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0