Fun and games -- not -- after website relaunch (Rails to Wordpress)

Keszi

Hi Kelly,

There are a few nice articles about this topic. I will point out a few, maybe these checklists will help you determine what could have gone wrong with the redesign:

I hope it helps! Keszi

Chris661

Hi Kelly,

I didn't see Yoast on your site and not sure if you are using another plugin to help manage SEO issues. Yoast is pretty well respected and the plugin can help manage some of the duplicate content issues in Word Press. (tags, categories)
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

Also some good reads on the Yoast site on optimizing a Word Press site. HTML5 and Schema should also be considered. There are some Word Press Gurus around here and hopefully they will chime in.

Best!

BellyBellyKelly

Hey Chris!

Thanks for the reply. Yes I have WP SEO Premium installed After sleeping on it, I think I just need some professional SEO help here, I am at a loss. There are quite a few issues, I need to sort out a disavow file (amongst other things) and it seems too complicated and time consuming!

BellyBellyKelly

Thanks Keszi,

The site has already launched, so it's all firefighting mode at the moment, lol!

Keszi

Oh, I know the feeling! I'd say, try to make an audit for the site, then make a priority list and take it step-by-step.

Let me know, if you need help.

Everett

Hello Kelly,

If you feel like you need a professional SEO to come help you recover from a site migration / redesign then I'd say you're probably right. Moz keeps a recommended list of professionals here if you need help choosing one.

I agree with Chris that you should probably switch your SEO plug-in. I wouldn't use anything but Yoast for that, and it could solve a lot of your problems. Don't let that stop you from getting a professional audit though. You should make sure the contract also states that they will provide implementation if you're not comfortable implementing all of their recommendations yourself.

Good luck.

TheeDigital

A lot of things happened here in combination. The new site launched. You say a disavow file was updated, was there a penalty or was this pre-emptive? You might have killed a lot of links that were helping you with this. Looks like you changed CDNs. The site was switched to secure, except for the forum, and a lot of the secure pages are displaying non-secure content? It looks like you added more ads to the site. You removed some urls in Google? You should really wait for the pages to switch naturally through the 301s to the new structure. What you may have done is deleted pages that would be showing right now while the new pages haven't been crawled and added yet. There are a ton of broken and redirected internal links after the new launch. Some old pages were never redirected and I would be willing to bet there were some links lost. Looking at a quick speed test on pingdom compared to the history, it looks like the site is taking twice as long to load now as it was before. There are some ridiculous redirect chains happening that need to be cleaned up. A lot of pages are redirected 2-5 times before reaching their current destinations.

One example:

http://bellybelly.com.au/articles/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game

http://bellybelly.com.au/articles/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/

http://bellybelly.com.au/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/

https://www.bellybelly.com.au/Breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/

https://www.bellybelly.com.au/breastfeeding/breastfeeding-a-confidence-game/

I would start by just getting your site back in order. It looks like this was not a great launch and there is a ton of cleanup that needs to be done.

BellyBellyKelly

Everett,

Thanks for your reply! WP SEO is the Yoast plug-in, is it not?

Appreciate the list, will take a look.

Kelly

BellyBellyKelly

Thanks for the reply Richard.

I was worried about the redirects. I have that server issue where there are some URL chars in uppercase. So there is a redirect for that. There is also one to remove /articles/ which is what my site started with (a htaccess rule stopped it years ago), but it reappeared after the relaunch.

Something new from the redesign is the addition of the / at the end of URLs. I don't know why that happened. But I was very unhappy with my designer's job, hence why I have hired a new one to help clean it up.

CDN's shouldn't have changed with the move, but I had a suspicion something different had gone on.

Yes, links have been lost. I don't know why. With the conversion from rails to WP, three database syncs occurred, and I ended up with three copies of some articles. So I have been redirecting them as google is listing them all as 404's.

The site was much faster, but something has happened since launch that has slowed it down.

So much mess...

BellyBellyKelly

Thanks again Plugin details in admin:

The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

Version 2.0 | By Team Yoast | View details |

Keszi

Yes, Wordpress SEO is the Yoast plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

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