Redesign, new content, new domain and 301 redirects (penalty?)

[snorkel]

We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight.

We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers.

Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?

[mrdavidingram]

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your problems.

This could be a penalty, however I'd say it's more likely that it's the natural fluctuation you'd expect to see with a large scale move like this. I've never seen a major revamp like this have rankings settle within a few days, and I'd expect you to see similar fluctuations for the next month.

One question regarding the 301; did you redirect the old sites on a page level (e.g did you redirect oldsite.com/blue-widgets to newsite.com/blue-widgets), or did you just redirect the whole domain to the new home page? If you did the later, this would explain why you lost rankings.

However...

There are lots of rumours of another penguin update this week, so depending on the timescale it could be something to do with this. What where the link profiles of the previous sites like? If they contained loads of exact match anchor text, and a poor % of branded anchor text, then this could well be the issue.

There was also a Panda update recently, however if you are confident about the quality and originality of your content then it's less likely to be this.

Cheers

David

[snorkel]

Hi David

Thanks for your reply.

This is how we did it:

We redirected our old webshops with a 301 redirect on 07-07-12 to the new webshop. We had a new design, a lot of new content, new url structure, new product images etc. etc (but everything is unique) (we redirected everything to the root 300K pages)

Nothing special happened and we conacted an SEO company to do a page on page redirect for the most important pages and then let the other links 301 to the root.

On 23-07-12 we received our rankings back for 3 days, then there was a massive drop in rankings. Even the brand name is not showing up for the .com version.

Now we changed the 300K redirects into 404 pages.

So this is the situation:

The most important pages from our old webshops are page to page redirected to the new webshop. All other urls are now 404.