Site Doing Horrible After Redesign

[DennisSeymour]

When we handle big sites like this, there are a lot of possible problems that we face, some of which are

• the traditional ecommerce problem of "unique content" - maybe generic content or copied from a supplier (not saying you are doing this, Im just putting it out there)
• another traditional problem with category pages and it's contents

These 2 could affect rankings. Honestly, 404's dont matter much for us unless it's a vital part of the site, not on any pages of the site or if it had a lot of links pointing to it previously

if it's worthless, we just let them die, so GWT can stop bugging us with it by next year lol.

The 301 is actually the first thing that could be blamed as it might not be able to pass the same juice as it could before all the algo updates. You could try restoring the old site on a new CMS that you choose and run this side by side but it might be too much trouble.

[josh330]

The reasoning, as I understand it, is that the hosted solutions will never give you complete control over coding.

Their input was this: You are going to want to stay away from hosted solutions if you want to have full control over your site and experience. So we would recommend against going with something like this, for instance.

[jesse-landry]

Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...

[AWCthreads]

Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?

[josh330]

Thanks Dennis.  Our SEO found quite a few pages that had good ranking that are now returning 404s. Is that what you mean by the the 301 being to blame?

[josh330]

Thanks for the response.  I'm only going off some of the things we were told to implement that we can't because that code is off limits. Can't implement canonical tags on home page, can't get rid of the https versions of all pages (home page, product pages, etc), can't put the blog on the root domain, etc.  It sounded like a big deal to me, but SEO and coding is not what I do, so I really wouldn't know any better.

[josh330]

I have not. I will mention that to our developer and see if she's heard of it.

[DennisSeymour]

Definitely a possible reason as you are already losing traffic from it already. Something you should look at ASAP. Those pages should be redirecting to the correct, new pages so I'm wondering why they werent properly 301'ed. Was the 301 service only sending your previous homepage to the new homepage and not per page? (Or even old pages to the new homepage)

[AWCthreads]

Were you ranking well prior to the move?

[AWCthreads]

Also, is your developer and SEO the same?

Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.

[josh330]

Yes, we were. Page 1, between position 3 and 7 on our main niche keywords.

[josh330]

Our developer and SEO are different folks and my relationship with each of them is completely independent from the other.  Great question though.

[AWCthreads]

Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.

[josh330]

You are absolutely correct.  A different platform, but a hosted one nonetheless.

[josh330]

You can see why I'm so confused!

[AWCthreads]

You may be in need of a second opinion.

[AWCthreads]

Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.

[josh330]

It was supposed to be every page and I was charged $600+ just for the redirecting part of the process separate and part from the design.

[erikellsworth]

Curious why you didn't keep your current Volusion URLs?  With BigCommerce (which we are a partner), you can match the Volusion URL and forego the 301 redirect if you feel that's critical to your SEO success.  A proper 301 redirect should be adequate and not account for such a dramatic drop of traffic.

As an ecommerce consultant you need to understand where your traffic was coming from and make sure that's protected when you move.  For example, if your products have a lot of Facebook Likes, when you change the URL, you will lose 100% of those Likes...and this should be a factor in choosing a new platform.

You should be able to diagnose what's happening from your Google Analytics.  Take a look at where traffic has dropped.  What landing pages were driving traffic before and no longer are?  What keywords have disappeared and what pages were appearing for those keywords?  Are those pages 301'd correctly?  What products and categories were driving your traffic and revenue?

Obviously check all your pages for proper meta tags (INDEX, FOLLOW)...with these "simple" platforms, it is easy to accidentally make your whole store disappear.

It sounds to me like something was missed during the migration and you're now.  We are a top Volusion consulting firm and have worked on hundreds of stores...and we're partners of both BigCommerce and 3dcart.  You can have a successful store on a hosted platform.  Having PHP access is not critical to your success.  Yes, it can help but you migrated from Volusion which has much more restrictions than BigCommerce (in terms of what you can accomplish from a template perspective and SEO)...so I feel we're missing something here.

[josh330]

Thank you Erik for the reply.  I switched the URLs based on the recommendation that the BC URLs were much more user friendly.  For example www.website.com/myproduct/ was better than www.website.com/category1_myproduct/269.html.

I feel we're missing something too!