Switched From Wordpress, Traffic Dropped In Half

[getrightmusic]

Hello,

Thank you for taking a look at my issue.

My site: http://www.getrightmusic.com

A month ago, I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. The reason being I wanted a more powerful membership functionality with media uploading. After I switched, my traffic basically dropped in half. I was averaging around 4-6,000 unique visitors per day and now I am at about 2,000 per day.

I resubmitted a new sitemap to Google webmasters. I also set up 301 redirects on my top 80 urls that were ranking well and driving traffic in Google.

Not only did Google kick me off of my top spots in the SERP's, but I no longer get indexed as quickly as I used to. With the old Wordpress site I would get url's indexed within minutes. Now they aren't even getting indexed really at all.

Is this a normal occurrence when switching site designs and systems?

Do you think Google will just take a little time before they give me back some respect?

Is there anything I should be doing to get back to ranking and getting indexed faster?

Thanks for any help or any insight you may have.

Jesse

[DanDeceuster]

Pretty standard. Site redesigns, especially when new URL's are involved, see immediate drops in rankings and traffic. Going to be a little while until they come back. I personally would never have made the switch. It's rarely worth it for the lost traffic. Isn't there a media uploading plugin or some kind of ftp plugin for wordpress you could have used? Guess it's too late. Just make sure all of your URL's are redirected, not just your top 80, you should be fine in the long run, but it's going to hurt for a little while.

For indexing problems, wordpress automatically pings search engines with new posts, so you likely got indexed very quickly in the past. Try and share a link to your new content on Google+ and that should get it indexed quickly.

[getrightmusic]

Thanks Daniel.

I've added the Google+ to all of my new posts hoping to help get indexed. I would have loved to stick with Wordpress, but I'm not a fan of using plugins and then worrying about them breaking when Wordpress updates and keeping on track of all that.

I chose my top 80 urls to 301 because I had over 3000 posts from my previous site. I just didn't have the time or resources to individually 301 them each.

I also haven't gotten my RSS set up yet. I'm hoping once I do (next week), I'll get that back into Feedburner, which I think should help get indexed faster again. Right?

Thanks for the quick reply Daniel!

Jesse

[RyanKent]

Hi Jesse.

WordPress and EE both offer quality CMS solutions. Search engines don't care at all how your site is developed, but instead will focus on your content and how it is presented with respect to tags and so forth.

Some questions for you:

• is your current content 100% identical when compared with when your site was on WP?

• did you use any SEO plugin while you were on WP?

• what other changes have been made on your site around the same time period?

• you mentioned 301 redirects. Did your URLs change during the switch?

Your site seems pretty solid on the basic SEO factors. You should NOT experience this issue purely from moving your site to a new CMS unless something else is wrong.

EDIT: Jesse, you have an issue with the redirects on your site.

http://www.getrightmusic.com/robots.txt returns a normal page from your site, and provides a "200" response showing it is the intended page.

I also tried http://www.getrightmusic.com/robots.txt123 as a URL, and also received a web page along with the "200" response.

After taking a closer look it seems to be your home page. So it seems you redirected all URLs without a page on your site to your home page? And you provide a "200" (page found, all ok) code rather then a 301?

Based on your above reply the reason for your drop in traffic is you lost the majority of your pages during the CMS change. While the pages still exist on your site, you lost any links to those pages and redirected users to your home page. The loss in traffic would be expected based on this method.

[getrightmusic]

Thanks for the response Ryan!

• My content is identical to the content that was on the WP site. I used a plugin to export my Wordpress posts to the EE site.

• I was using the Joast SEO plugin while on WP. I have a similar SEO plugin installed now with EE though for the meta data.

• My URL structure did change from the Wordpress site.

I think I do have all url's redirecting to the homepage. Should I have set it up differently? My top 80 urls redirect to their respective posts on the new EE site.

Do I have to go in and redirect all of my old urls to their individual corresponding new EE urls?

Should I just wait it out and hope Google gives me some love back?

Thanks for the help Ryan!

[RyanKent]

If you value your site's SEO, you should properly redirect your pages as much as possible. The method of redirection is dependent on your server and the technologies involved. For example, if you are using an Apache server in a shared environment, you would need to add a redirect to your htaccess file using a proper regex expression.

I tried to check your site to compare URLs but it is currently unavailable. In short, try to determine a pattern between your old URLs and new URL structure, then map them over.

Example:

OLD URL: mysite.com/music/mix/artistname

NEW URL mysite.com/album/artistname

In the above example you would write an expression which would replace /music/mix/ with /album/ so your old URLs would smoothly redirect to their new URL. You would make this change using the 301 code so browsers clearly identify the links should be updated.

[reilly3000]

I totally agree. Every URL is precious... Every one deserves a 301. In terms of indexing, WordPress has a built in ping feature for whenever content gets published, but so does EE... It just needs some configuration. Look for it in EE docs. Also, consider using LG Better Meta for EE. It gives you nice control over metadata plus if you work at it you can use it to help auto generate an accurate XML sitemap. This helps with indexing significantly IMHO. I love EE's power, but after our last few projects with it I would rather stick with WordPress for content publishing and custom code any needed features rather than fight with and pay for EE.

[getrightmusic]

Thanks Chris! I did get the NSM Better Meta plugin installed and I really like it. So, I have a new sitemap with Google created. I love Wordpress as well, I just felt that all of my competitors were using it and I needed to stand out from everyone else Plus I wanted complete control over where and how my content is presented . It has been trickier even with good designers and developers, but I'm hoping in the end it will pay off. I was just pretty surprised at how fast Google broke up with me. I guess it's time for me to go back and wine and dine again for some G Love. Next time this situation occurs I will focus more on 301'ing each url before the switch. Thanks for the reply Chris!