Google ranking is HORRIBLE. Following SEOMoz suggestions and just can't climb.
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First of all, the URL is stores.dhsequipment.com.
In January, this online store switched from Homestead to Big Commerce. Since the store updated, we decided now is the time to update our product descriptions, URL's, title tags and meta descriptions. (For the first time, we had the ability to customize our URL's.)
Product Description: I went through 2,500 products and updated the product description. I added an H1 & H2 to each description, and included pertinent information such as part numbers. Each product also received a new page title, meta description (which is usually the first line of the product description, don't know if this is bad or not) and a new URL, (which did redirect).
Once I would complete a section, I would submit a new sitemap to Webmaster Tools.
After a month and nothing happening, I started using SEOMoz which helped me rebuild some of my more important pages, such as the home page and main category pages such as:
http://stores.dhsequipmentparts.com/stihl-ts420-parts/
http://stores.dhsequipmentparts.com/stihl-ts700-parts-stihl-ts800-parts/I fetched these pages in Webmaster Tools after completion. However, it's been several weeks since and I'm still on page 4 or 5 in the SERPs.
Just a little history on the store; this store has been in operation for more than 6 years. Previously, we ranked on page one for 75%+ of our products. My belief is because our URL's had history, probably more so than our competitors.
I'm not sure what I should do. Business is super slow and we can't afford to wait much longer.
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That is our next step. We discussed it this morning after your original post. Thank you.
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Regardless of what Google says or does, links are still a huge factor in search rankings. You need to some quality links to your site to see improvement in your SERP positions. The Moz blog is full of tips on it.
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Honestly, we've never had any.
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On top of the site move issues, I just put your site in Open Site Explorer and you have no backlinks from anyone. That's a big part of your ranking problem. Did you get rid of a bunch or have you never had any?
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There are many routes. I am not saying which one is best or which one will work. Some might work, some might be a disaster. I suggest hiring an SEO who has experience in recovering site moves that have gone bad.
Two routes that come to my mid are...
A) Go back to Homestead and have them restore an exact copy of your site from back up. This would have been a good choice if done immediately after your move. Now a couple months have gone by and this might be a bad move. You need advice from someone who has experience in this problem.
B) If you have a list of the Homestead URLs. You might be able to find someone who knows how to do 301 redirects on BigCommerce. I saw lots of old URLs of your site at Archive.org and they were hitting 404 pages on your new domain, some were doing 302 redirects, some were producing an empty page. This might recover some of your loss. How much, I can't say. You need an experienced person.
So there you have Door A and Door B. Each has its problems. There could be Door C and Door D that an experience person would know about.
If this was my site I would be hiring experience as soon as possible.
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In the case that I do not have access to the htaccess file, is there anything else that I can do? Or, is there anything else that I could do regardless?
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I believe our old, previous store has been taken down by Homestead.
So, if you left Homestead and they have shut down the service that you had there... then you will need to have an htaccess file on your current host that lists all of the Homestead URLs and 301 redirects every one of them to equivalent URLs on your BigCommerce site. Without that the traffic flow from Homestead will be cut off and the powerflow will evaporate.
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According to Big Commerce? Yes, old URL's will 301 redirect to new URL's automatically when you edit them. However, when we first started updating our products, we found that a lot of product URL's didn't redirect. Instead it gave us a 404 page.
I believe our old, previous store has been taken down by Homestead. I can't find any of our old organic results for that store to give you an example.
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You mentioned that you changed your URLs. Did you do 301 redirects to the new URLs to preserve the rankings and power?
If I grab old URLs of your site from archive.org and copy/paste them into a browser most of them are hitting 404 pages.
Also seeing duplicate content on the mybigcommerce
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