Rankings Tanked After Redesign

[josh330]

This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience.

Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure.

Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms.

I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible.

Now I have no idea where to even begin.  Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%!

Any insight is very, very much appreciated.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hello Joshua,

Did you let Google know in your webmaster tools?

Did you submit a new sitemap to Google?

[josh330]

Hi Bryan:

I did submit the new sitemap to Google and all the pages appear to be indexed, they are just ranking way, way lower.

I did notice there are a lot of 404's listed in webmaster tools, but a lot of those are from old products we discontinued. The design company told me those won't hurt anything, but I am not sure.

[PowerToolWorld]

Hi Joshua,

There are so many potential causes for your problem.

Take a look at this post.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/42824/

I would also check your canonical tags. Sometimes during redesigns on platforms they get left and ignored. I've also seen quite a few issues with mega menu type designs and no follow links. The list is kinda endless.

Try not to generate 404's for old products. They could be carrying links, try and redirect them or keep them if you plan on getting them back in stock. If the company didn't suggest doing that with products then I would also consider seeking out some consulting.

Rgds

Kyle

[KarlBantleman]

404's won't harm rankings, as long as it is a properly formatted 404. Did you change SEO companies as well? the reason I ask is that it might be more than just the redesign, it may be the links they are building.

[jesse-landry]

Basically I'd add to the already helpful comments here by saying - is it possible the redesign has bad content? Have you researched keyword density and on-site optimization for the keywords you are targeting? Using a tool like ranks.nl, figure out what changed in this regard.. Surely you have backups of the old site to compare to but if not use the Wayback machine.

It might be completely focused on the site's new content and have nothing at all to do with redirection or link juice. That would be my first guess, but as everyone has said it could be any number of things or all of the above.

[josh330]

Thank you everyone for your response.  So as a manufacturer, I am far from an SEO guy. Would it behoove me to go with an expert to review?

Additionally, as far as SEO companies, we didn't switch, we just quit using.  We used one that I thought was top-shelf, but they did many blackhat techniques and actually hurt our rankings during the one Google update - this was in 2011.  Rankings improved after we quit using them.

I think the content on the new site is good.  The old site had tons of keyword stuffing, so we cleaned up our descriptions so they read more human-like.

[jesse-landry]

well apparently it did end up hurting. There are ways to make it optimized for keywords while still retaining it's humanity. An SEO person would/should be good at this. If you want to learn and do it yourself, you totally can. Honestly, it's a full-time job. So I would probably hire it out if I were you.

But it's up to you of course.

[iPullRank]

Hey Josh,

I'm leery of the "301 redirect add-on" and that would be the first thing that I double-check. I'd pull all of the links that you guys have run all the link targets through a web crawler such as Screaming Frog to make sure that they aren't your 404s. My main concern is that your link equity has not been maintained.

I'd also look at the quality of the links as was mentioned later in this thread, then I'd start looking at whether your content is what we'd consider thin.

There's a lot of moving parts here, but without more information on the site I can't give you a more definitive answer.

[josh330]

Thanks @iPullRank.  There are so many moving parts here and we have decided it is just beyond our understanding to get this fixed.  We've decided to work with the folks at Portent Interactive to start a long term fix.  Thank you, everyone, for your feedback and assistance. If there is one thing I've learned it's that we need to be working with trustworthy folks like those within the Moz community.