Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages

[jmaccom]

We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com

It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic.   Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages.   We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website.   F

or Example:  If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38"  You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm)  That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38")

We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways.   What are we doing wrong???  Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.

[MonicaOConnor]

Did you also move to HTTPS? It looks like your canonical tags are set to the https version of your site. Have you added that site to GWT?

There is something in your CSS/HTML file that is taking forever to load. I would look for bad JS. The page spins for about 45 seconds before it actually loads.

In GWT, go to Crawl > Sitemaps > and look at your submitted sitemap. Make sure it sees all of the pages. You should also be able to see if pages are being indexed. It looks like you have about 565,000 pages indexed for www.jmac.com. You still have 360,000 pages indexed for www.jmacsupply.com. So, I would infer that the old site is still being deindexed and until that is finalized you might be having issues with duplicate content. Two weeks is a little premature to freak out in my opinion. This can take 4-6 weeks to finalize. There is always a period of time after a migration where traffic kind of plummets. If after 4 weeks you are still having issues, I would try fetching some pages as Google and seeing what happens.

Google's mobile bot tends to crawl pages faster than the desktop bot. That would explain why your mobile page is ranking in engines for specific product searches. If I just Google the name of your company, your mobile site is a few pages deep.

Some things to check would be that your 301 redirects have been implemented accurately, make sure you have set the preferred domain in GWT, add both the www version and non www version of the site as well as the https and non https version of your site, and make sure that your canonical tags are set correctly. If the https is your preferred version, whenever someone types in jmac.com they should land on the https version, and that is not happening.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Judah. Running the Desktop version through Google's Page Insights returns a score of 27/100. See: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jmac.com%2FKeedex_K_DS_FLX38_p%2Fkeedex-k-ds-flx38.htm&tab=desktop

While the mobile version is at 75/100 for desktop and 66/100 for mobile (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jmac.com%2Fmobile%2FProduct.aspx%3FProductCode%3DKEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38&tab=desktop)

Based on those factors alone, it looks like Google could be returning the mobile site as the 'better' version for users. Another thing you should employ though is 302 redirection based on OS / browser detection so that trying to go to the mobile version with a desktop browser results in seeing the desktop page. See: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en, while following the rest of the practices on that page. Cheers!

[DirkC]

I agree with Ryan - there is something fundamentally wrong with the way your page is build. I checked the speed of a productpage with Webpagetest.org - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150311_PM_15Z8/1/details/ - if you look at the number of items loaded, it doesn't correspond with what is shown on screen.

I am not an expert in Javascript, but your HTML page is filled with it, and it seems to be loading much more files than you actually need. There are 412 image requests (!) for a total of 2105075 bytes, 21 HTML requests for 1593795 bytes, 18 javascript requests (326065 bytes)

Your developer did something really wrong here, and you need to correct this asap. In my experience, it's not normal that you loose 90% of organic traffic. I did several migrations over the last couple of months, of very big sites with no loss of search traffic.

Apart from this urgent problem, I would also block your shoppingcart and review links for indexing - they generate an enormous amount of 302 redirects Example urls: https://www.jmac.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=HONEYWELL-ADEMCO-747F&ID=39994&yes=yes - http://www.jmac.com/ShoppingCart.asp?ProductCode=SILENT-KNIGHT-PS-DA - put a nofollow on these links or block them in robots.txt

Hope this helps,

Dirk