Huge rewrite and drop in ratings

[danlae]

Hi,

My website provider made a huge rewrite of code to make the website more SEO friendly and add more functions. It absolutely was a big step forward and gave me more possiblities to improve our site seo wise.

We were actually first webshop of 200-300 on the new platform - and thats not always a good idea i guess I need some help on the best way to solve 1 big problem for us. They changed the URL structure. Ive been building the brand pages and have 2-6 linking root domains to each brand page:

for the brand ej sikke lej the catalogue used to be : http://www.epleskrinet.no/ej_sikke_lej/M_16

they changed it to http://www.epleskrinet.no/manufacturers/ej-sikke-lej . I told them the same day the new version was ot the the optimal URL would be http://www.epleskrinet.no/ej-sikke-lej . It wasnt utill i saw the crawl i understood what the URL change would mean to us. We have a decent amount of organic searches and now visitors come to an empty page with an error message. to the brand ej sikke lej i have 6 linking domains going to this page. The new brand pages are a lot weaker then the old one since they dont have the ingoing links.  Our site was indexed yesterday and the result rankingwise wasent pretty. How do i go about to fix this. Is it possible to -301 redirect old brad catalogues to new one ? They are not even in the new site map i am sending in.

Thanks

[Mikpam]

When changing URLs it is imperative that you 301 the old urls to the new ones. If you do not have a record of your old urls go to the way back machine  and hope your site is there and copy the old urls and 301 them to the corresponding pages via HTaccess or extensions depending on the CMS you are using. The old urls with links to them should also start showing up in Google webmaster tools but for the mean time also look at your top pages in Google analytics check if they exist , if not 301 them appropriately ASAP.

** P.S. do a site: search in Google site:www.epleskrinet.no/ you will find 404s i just found a bunch.

Hope this helps . Let me know if there is anything we can help you with

[EGOL]

If this website is important for running a business, I think that you should stop listening to this website provider and get help from a professional SEO.

Your post reveals several problems and it is very likely that there are more lurking.  Probably more than anyone is going to be able to evaluate in the quick look that they can afford to give in a Q&A reply.

I am not trying to bash anyone.. just saying what I would do if this was my website and I was in your position.

[danlae]

Yes its for running a business, but its still fairly small and the budget isnt there for external SEO. I know that i know more SEO then they do and my knowledge is from this site and only 3-4 months old. I am quite sure i can have them redirect by tomorrow. Except from that ill just have to do my best find what is not done right and have them fix it

[EGOL]

OK... it sounds like you are learning a lot.  There is value in that.

Good luck!