Site Doing Horrible After Redesign

[josh330]

Hello Fellow Forum Members:

Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this.

• Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform.  We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings.
• By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site.
• As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%.
• Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently.
• In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with.
• By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more.
• Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best.

So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform?

We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.

[DennisSeymour]

Have you continued link building work on the current domain ever since you 301'ed it? It's really a tricky situation. It could be due to old links on the original domain (especially after penguin in may and the monthly pandas)

If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it. Magento is actually pretty seo friendly and since you have a dev, then it's even easier. I would not recommend wordpress for big ecommerce sites so it will depend on your site's size.

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.

The links mostly pointed to our home page and some of our main category pages, so those did redirect accordingly. We also saw a slight decline in during the Google updates, but had recovered most of the way from those. In GA, it is easy to see the traffic drop begins when our redesign launched.

You said, "If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it.". To be honest, that's what we can't figure out.  Did the lack of comprehensive 301's which caused a lot of 404's cause this, or our platform choice.  That's what we don't know but are trying to figure out before we make a big move.

Our product catalog is probably around 600+ products right now but will be heading into the thousands by year's end.

Don't know if this response helps at all or not.

[jesse-landry]

I agree with Dennis. Sounds like it's time to bite the bullet and re-build. Take it as a lesson and move on.

In the meantime, have you considered driving in traffic through a PPC campaign? Might stop the bleeding..

[jesse-landry]

maybe (maybe) sharing the URL will help..? hard to say, really, what the problem is.

[josh330]

Thank you Jesse for your response.  Yes, our PPC campaigns have been what has been keeping us afloat.  We have managed to keep our business alive, albeit in a much more expensive way.

When you say bite the bullet and rebuild, do you feel the Wordpress option or Magento option is a better place to begin research?

[jesse-landry]

I would lean towards Magento for similar reasons to what Dennis said already. Also I just have had poor Wordpress experiences and feel like Google is out to get 'em. That last part is all in my head and completely made up but that's enough to sway me towards Magento.

[AWCthreads]

If you're trying to keep your business alive, Magento may be pricey for you.

Have you looked at 3dCart?

[josh330]

We were looking at the Magento Community Edition, although I know we'll still have development costs.

The recommendation I've been given was to stay away from all hosted cart solutions: Volusion, Bigcommerce, 3dCart, Shopify, etc.

[AWCthreads]

Why are they giving you that suggestion?  What is their reasoning?

[DennisSeymour]

When we handle big sites like this, there are a lot of possible problems that we face, some of which are

• the traditional ecommerce problem of "unique content" - maybe generic content or copied from a supplier (not saying you are doing this, Im just putting it out there)
• another traditional problem with category pages and it's contents

These 2 could affect rankings. Honestly, 404's dont matter much for us unless it's a vital part of the site, not on any pages of the site or if it had a lot of links pointing to it previously

if it's worthless, we just let them die, so GWT can stop bugging us with it by next year lol.

The 301 is actually the first thing that could be blamed as it might not be able to pass the same juice as it could before all the algo updates. You could try restoring the old site on a new CMS that you choose and run this side by side but it might be too much trouble.

[josh330]

The reasoning, as I understand it, is that the hosted solutions will never give you complete control over coding.

Their input was this: You are going to want to stay away from hosted solutions if you want to have full control over your site and experience. So we would recommend against going with something like this, for instance.

[jesse-landry]

Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...

[AWCthreads]

Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.  Our SEO found quite a few pages that had good ranking that are now returning 404s. Is that what you mean by the the 301 being to blame?

[josh330]

Thanks for the response.  I'm only going off some of the things we were told to implement that we can't because that code is off limits. Can't implement canonical tags on home page, can't get rid of the https versions of all pages (home page, product pages, etc), can't put the blog on the root domain, etc.  It sounded like a big deal to me, but SEO and coding is not what I do, so I really wouldn't know any better.

[josh330]

I have not. I will mention that to our developer and see if she's heard of it.

[DennisSeymour]

Definitely a possible reason as you are already losing traffic from it already. Something you should look at ASAP. Those pages should be redirecting to the correct, new pages so I'm wondering why they werent properly 301'ed. Was the 301 service only sending your previous homepage to the new homepage and not per page? (Or even old pages to the new homepage)

[AWCthreads]

Were you ranking well prior to the move?

[AWCthreads]

Also, is your developer and SEO the same?

Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.