Site Migration Impressions Disaster - What would you do?

[Bio-RadAbs]

What does Moz's crawl diagnostics say about your website say? I see simple things like a meta description missing from your new page http://www.mobile-tronics.com/mobile-tv-stands/

• Do you have duplicate content? Thin content?

Also:

• Can Google crawl your site by using "Fetch as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools?
• Check your logs to confirm Googlebot is crawling your site. site:mobile-tronics.com shows just over 1000 pages, is this correct? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Amobile-tronics.com&oq=site%3Amobile-tronics.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1505j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

[Chris.Bleill]

Richard - thanks so much for the quick reply.  I did consider the proximity to the Penguin 3.0 release, but this incident took place the third week of September (2 weeks after a major site revamp) and my records show Penguin 3.0 showed up about a month later, on Oct 17?

Great question on the redirects in the older htaccess file - I did check them and there were none to speak of.  If there were, once 301 redirects are read by Google, aren't they stored as permanent by the search engine, even if they are removed from the site's htaccess?

[Chris.Bleill]

Hi Cyto - the Moz crawl diagnostic shows a few 404 errors, some titles and meta descriptions that are too long/short, and a few missing meta descriptions.  No duplicate content on the new site is listed.

Yes - Google can crawl the site and Webmaster Tools says 793 of the 801 URLs in my sitemap are indexed.

[TheeDigital]

There were many webmasters who reported drops around October 11th which appears to be what your screenshot from Webmaster Tools shows. This could have been when Penguin actually rolled out (rather than when it was announced) or could have been an update to the previous Panda update. A couple references:

https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/review/scam-reporting-sites-drop/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-4-1-poll-19330.html

As for redirects, no they are not permanent even though a "permanent redirect" does sound like it would be doesn't it? They are permanent as long as they are still in place if that makes sense? An easy way to see this is redirect an established domain to another site. i.e. let's say microsoft.com redirected with a 301 to google.com for a period of 6 months. Those searching for Microsoft would actually see Google in the SERPs instead for those 6 months. When the redirect is removed after 6 months, Microsoft would be returned again and Google would be no where to be found.

http://www.mobile-tronics.com/Catselect.asp?DepartmentID=1&RepID=&MenuID=sub3&BasketID=  this was your url for computer furniture from 2001-2008. I'm guessing after that a SEF plugin was used to change the urls. If this was the case, this redirect was in fact in place until you changed the structure recently. You may have lost the value of all links to this page (and most of the rest of your site) that you had accrued from 2001-2008.

[Chris.Bleill]

Richard - this is immensely helpful for sure.  I looked at the wrong htaccess earlier today.  Here is a section from the correct .htaccess that I think identifies with what you are referring to:

From Ultimate SEO URLs

RewriteRule ^(.)-p-(.).html$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-c-(.).html$ index.php?main_page=index&cPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-m-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pi-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=popup_image&pID=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pr-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=product_reviews&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pri-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

You are correct - there is a plug-in in the old ZenCart site that created the "seo friendly URLs".  I think it created a database table to matrix the Zen Cart internal page ID's against it's calculated SEO friendly URLS (that's what this redirect looks like to me - see above.
Do you think all is lost because of the amount of time that it's been since the migration, or do you think if I can mine the original database and recreate the ID -> Old URL mapping as new 301 redirects, I might recover this?  Makes me sick to my stomach to think that we lost reputation from pre-2008!

Thank you for the continued conversation!

[Chris.Bleill]

One more note: I did upload a disavow file with about 100 domains on it in June of 2014.  I suppose it's possible that it could have coincidentally taken effect around the time of the site migration...  But I wouldn't expect it to lower impressions?

[Bio-RadAbs]

I think Richard has found a big hole in the redirection. His research is intact, look at this URL from february 2014

https://web.archive.org/web/20040206174915/http://www.mobile-tronics.com/Prodselect.asp?CategoryID=136&BasketID=

Here's a fantastic tool I use to check redirects

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

You run the check and it's a 404 not found, no 301 is in place.

• Any rank juice those URLs have gathered is broken and not transferred. (Google does value a site with a history)
• I would still put these old URLs back as redirects to your new website. (no jumping, straight to the new URLs)
• You mentioned you did a disavow, but I take it that was only to spammy or domains of low quality, then it shouldn't make an impact as you've removed the spam.

[MonicaOConnor]

I just moved a Volusion site to Big Commerce. I think that you should implement the SEO friendly short URLS. This will give you back the URL structure you lost moving from Zen Cart.

I think that you might be suffering from the Penguin update because it targeted the link neighborhoods. You link profile shows links to sites that have extremely spammy link profiles. A lot of people were guilty by association with the 10/17 Penguin update. Although you lost some of the impressions, you can get them back with new, fresh, authoritative links. What is your current linking strategy?

I don't think that the URL structure could be 100% responsible for a loss in impressions. I think that you will have to look a little deeper, just make sure that your 301 redirects are accurate.

When I moved to BigCommerce I found that I had to do a lot of manual 301 redirects as well. Our site in Volusion was extremely sloppy as far as 301 redirects and category structure. It could be possible that there were some pages on the site that didn't get redirected correctly.

[Chris.Bleill]

Monica - thank you for the great input.  I too wonder if some of this might be Penguin, although looking at my traffic profile over the past year I'm thinking that Richard is right, that there might be a Panda component to my problem also.

I'm not quite sure where to start for linking with a B2B E-Com business (office furniture).  It's pretty hard to create link bait for a overhead projector cart   I'm definitely open to recommendations, and would be even more excited for a referral to a firm that could help with that.

[Chris.Bleill]

Cyto,

Thanks again - I will dig into that redirection hole and see what I can come up with!

Chris

[MonicaOConnor]

Panda and Penguin, every SEOs best buddies...

I work with a company called Orion Group LLC. They are a great firm for off page optimization. I myself am not a great link builder, mainly because I am not a good sales person. I technically know the aspects of it, but have never been great at implementing it. I would give them a call.

I would say that if you want to decipher between Panda and Penguin you will have to go down the list of Content Vs. Links to really lay it on the line. If you have not seen a manual penalty then you have a chance to get things in order before the next update.

For Penguin:

1. Do you have links that don't generate traffic or have really keyword dense anchor text? Anchor text that is so repetitive you are basically keyword stuffing your link profile?

2. Do you have links to Payday loan stores, tobacco sites, porn sites or any other website with a low online reputation?

3. Do you have a lot of links that return 404 errors?

4. Do you have enough reputable links to outweigh any negative link juice? For example, a link to a DA of 100 (Pinterest, Youtube) compared to 10 links to sites with a DA of 10.

5. Is your link profile diverse? Do you have links in content, footers,blogs, links to industry related sites, links that send social signals (FaceBook likes and shares, Google +1s, twitter retweets)?

Panda questions:

1. Is my content uniquely valuable wherever it can be?

2. Do I have any User Generated Content?

3. Do I have any ads above the fold?

4. Is there any engagement on the pages that I am targeting keywords with?

5. Is my site easy to navigate and understand? Am I conveying my message clearly?

6. Do I have a ton of links in my content, whether internal or external?

7. Is my overall user experience pleasant?

I hope that helps you try to narrow down the pesky P named animal that is causing you trouble. I am sure with a Big Commerce template your UX is doing well. I hope that you figure this out soon!

The only other thing I would look at is mobile search traffic to see if that is having an effect. As well as the overall seasonality of your business. Is it possible that this is just a slow time of year?

[Chris.Bleill]

Cyto,
Quick question on this.  If the URL's are from years ago and have been redirected ever since, wouldn't Google etc have removed them from their cache and replaced them with the SEO Friendly URLs that we had in place since 2006?  I guess I'm just wondering if there really is such a "hole" since I'm not really seeing many 404 URLS in Google Webmaster Tool crawl report.

Said differently, does Google really "save" all of the URLs that you've ever had and check those regularly to see if they are no longer redirected?

Thanks,

Chris

[Chris.Bleill]

Richard,

Quick question on this.  If the URL's (such as the one you referenced above) are from years ago and have been redirected via the SEO URL tool on my old site ever since, wouldn't Google etc have removed them from their cache and replaced them with the SEO Friendly URLs that we had in place since 2008?  I guess I'm just wondering if there really is such a "hole" since I'm not really seeing many 404 URLS in Google Webmaster Tool crawl report.

Said differently, does Google really "save" all of the URLs that you've ever had and check those regularly to see if they are no longer redirected?

Thanks,

Chris

[TheeDigital]

If there are links on 3rd party sites that still point to those old pages and the links were never updated to the newer addresses, then yes, Google will still crawl them.

[MonicaOConnor]

No, once you 301 redirect the URLS, Google starts to remove them from their index. So, if you have URLs that are from years and years ago that have been 301 redirected they should no longer be in the Google index. If you don't have a lot of 404 errors then I would make the assumption that the older URLs haven't been crawled or cached or indexed and that the 301 redirects worked properly. I would just add that removing the 301s also removes whatever page value had been "transferred" to your new pages. The link juice especially.