Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch

[WWWSEO]

We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites.

The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions).

I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites.

I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?

[eLab_London]

How did you migrate the sites across? Did you map all of your existing url's etc? More information would help.

If it were me I would look at the variances between sites already migrated with no problems and the one with problems, identify those and it may help you know where to look regarding the problem.

Sorry I couldn't help more.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Phew! After reading all that text I'm still not sure what the exact issue is. Correct me if i'm wrong. Basically, after redesign and restructure website doesn't rank, even though there are no technical issues?

Now, I understand that tech issues can be the reason for not ranking, but what about actual on-page SEO, is everything else perfect?

[WWWSEO]

Existing URLs were mapped to new pages and 301s put in place (we also used OSE and Search Console to identify pages that are being linked to and set up 301s for those). Any pages that weren't mapped (old products, for example), had a catch-all 301 rule applied that redirects those to the homepage (I'll go in to Search Console and see which pages are throwing soft 404s and clean those up. We'll be adding 404 pages in the near future). A small handful of these pages kept the same URL if it was SEO-friendly, but the majority of the dual gender pages we kept used some kind of filter, so those ended up being changed. Though, the majority of the site is completely new pages.

As far the migrating the sites, I believe once one site was done, the dev team basically made copies of that site and edited images/text/styles for each brand (these are all brand eCommerce sites).

Does that help?

[WWWSEO]

Ha! I know, I wasn't sure how much information was needed to help explain the situation, so I just included whatever I could think of.

So, yes, we expected a time frame where the site would drop in rank, the new pages would need to be indexed and the old pages would need to be de-indexed, etc. But none of the other sites that were moved over have taken this long to recover. Granted, I think most of them had an easier transition since there were many more landing pages that continued to have the same URLs. In some cases, once Google had figured out which pages to index and which no longer existed, I saw an instant switch out and the new page was ranking at the same spot the old one was.

On-page SEO isn't looking okay. We've made edits to it, we're trying to avoid cannibalization, so each page has a specific target, etc. We're working on writing body copy for any pages that are lacking, but the old sites didn't have any, so I'm thinking that's probably not the main issue (although I'm sure it'll definitely help once it's up).

[DmitriiK]

Hmmm..

Well, I would make sure to work on on-page SEO and use "fetch as google" in GWT after any work is done to ensure crawling of all changes.

Other than that - I'm not even sure what to say. Check periodically for tech issues and other errors and make sure that all redirects are properly working.

[MattAntonino]

If you want to post or PM me the link I'd like to take a deeper look at the specific domain in question. We're often shooting in the dark when we don't have the link as there could be 100 reasons it isn't working the way you want.

[MattAntonino]

Thanks for the link via PM.

• You have 20,000 links from Chinese spam.
• Your main anchor text is like 56%.
• Your main homepage is a country selector page.
• Meta titles are almost all related to the same 3 keyphrases.

I'll PM you - but yes, I see more than a couple problems.