What are we doing wrong with our new ecommerce site SEO vs. client's original (non-SEO'd) site?

[outofboundsdigital]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

Just a couple of questions....

Did you reuse the product descriptions, etc. from the old site on the new site.  In other words do you have a duplicate content problem between the domains?

Have you done any promotion of the new site that will produce links, likes, tweets, etc?  If not, then that might be your problem.

Why have you not doe a 301 redirect of the old site to the new site?  If you do this correctly a lot of the rankings of the old site will be transferred to the new site.

[outofboundsdigital]

thanks for reply!

answers:

1. Did you reuse the product descriptions, etc. from the old site on the new site.  In other words do you have a duplicate content problem between the domains?
   • the old site is not live, it is blocked by robots.txt file so there is no dup content issue
2. Have you done any promotion of the new site that will produce links, likes, tweets, etc?  If not, then that might be your problem.
   • no but we did 301 redirect over 12,000 old urls to new urls and made sure all the old urls with external links pointing to them were redirected as well. the site has alot of links to it, mainly to product pages so i feel we have all that link juice captured properly
3. Why have you not doe a 301 redirect of the old site to the new site?  If you do this correctly a lot of the rankings of the old site will be transferred to the new site.
   • yeah, we did this, huge project to do over 13,000 url redirects!

[EGOL]

OK... thanks... sounds like you have done the things that I would do.

If this site was recently 301ed it is possible that your traffic drop is simply from the redirect not being fully recognized.  We 301ed a domain in February and lost some traffic to several folders... but a month later we were back up to normal.

[outofboundsdigital]

is it maybe that the new site is more 'vertical' than the old site? the old site, if you look at it, is horribly designed and architected but it does have many, many more Level 1 categories and less subcategory organization than our new site

[EGOL]

If I try to go to your new site I get a page of ads from my ISP.

[outofboundsdigital]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

Is it possible that those subcategory pages were pulling in a lot of traffic.  Now that they are gone you are not getting traffic from their keywords?

That is a guess.  If you want more information you will need to get traffic data from before and after for comparison.  That will tell you if you lost keywords entirely or if traffic for specific keywords fell.