Traffic down after site migration

[neooptic]

Hi! I've been working on a campaign for http://www.alwayshobbies.com/, which has seen a 35% in drop in traffic since changing ecommerce platforms. It's now been two months, but there is no sign of recovery.

We are in the middle of cleaning up the link profile as part of a resubmission request, but that has been ongoing since before the migration. A lot of redirects were needed after 10k 404s appeared in Webmaster Tools after the new launch, but these have been reduced to around 500. We've been pretty thorough here, but I thought it would be worth checking in case there's something we've missed.

[bradwayland]

If there were 10,000 404's after launch then I believe something in the rebuild/redesign of the site was not worked through thoroughly enough.  I have found that overall Google doesn't penalize sites for 404 errors but if I woke up one morning to 10,000 of them I wouldn't be surprised if Google kept me down for a while.  For example, I purchased a blog last year.  I didn't pay much for it but it had about 200,000 pageviews a month.  I failed to pay any attention to it after purchase but one day woke up and my servers were spiking.  I realized the the php handler was different than all my other WordPress sites so I had a developer switch it over for me.  After the switch the server calmed down and then I didn't pay any attention to the site for a period of weeks.  Then one day I went out to the site and clicked a link and it took me to a 404 page.  Within minutes I realized that nearly every link was going to 404.  When we changed the php handler the urls were changed for some reason.  We quickly corrected the problem but Google has never restored our ranks.  Now the site gets about 120,000 pageviews a month.  It was 3 weeks but once I lost the ranks I never got them back.  I don't have an exact answer for you but the fact there are still 500 404's is a huge problem.  In my organizations we don't tolerate 404's for long.  As soon as we find them to work to get them corrected.  Woke up yesterday to 98 404's and sent over a spreadsheet to the dev team to fix.

Good luck!

[neooptic]

Thanks Brad. It's a big ecommerce site, so I thought a few wouldn't be too much of an issue. Really interesting to read your experiences. I wonder if anyone out there has successfully resolved an issue like this before?

[bradwayland]

I do see that it is a large site so managing these kinds of things becomes more difficult.  We are getting ready to change platforms in May.  My approach was to keep every URL the same as possible.  I understand that 301's work but that doesn't mean that 301's are ideal.  Cutts will say that these should pass the value but we really don't know what other factors are involved.  In our case we will map every url and we will keep all the urls the same as possible.  In the end we will still need to do a bunch of 301s.  One area where we were able to fix a lot of problems was by requiring all product page urls, sub category, and main category urls to stay the same.  Hope you figure it out.

[DennisSeymour]

just make sure your redirects are good. Fix those asap and make sure the site doesnt have any crawl issues. Check out your page speed since you just moved to a new platform. Get the onpage stuff done asap to start getting the traffic back