Effect Of Restoring Old Website After Implementing 301 Redirects

[Kingalan1]

After redesigning my old Drupal website and launching a new "improved" Wordpress version the new version is performing badly. Ranking is poor and conversions don't occur. I realize that my new design is bad (no call to action, poor structure, text heavy). New business inquiries have ceased. The site contains 450 pages.

After spending $25,000 and a year of my life I see the new version is not an improvement!

What would be the effect of reinstating the old version of the site and doing 301 redirects back to it? Would the old rankings be restored?

I need to decide whether I should revert or focus on fixing flaws in the improved design.

Any thoughts??

Thanks,
Alan

[Chris.Menke]

Kingalan,

If you had reason to leave the old site behind, those reasons will still be there if you return to it.  Without knowing any more than what you've said, I'd lean towards keeping the new site, making sure all the transitional SEO tasks were taken care of when you moved to the new site and just press hard on optimizing/marketing the new wordpress.  Did you make sure you followed through on all the SEO that had to take place when you moved from the original site?

[Kingalan1]

Thanks Chris:

The URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

On an positive note the following is pretty good:
-Code validates
-Site speed is fast

The following is weak:
-Yoast has not yet been uses to optimize for keywords on the vast bulk of the 500 pages
-The way CDN on Amazon has been set up, Google only sees photo filename as alphanumeric tags. Also, I can't edit more than the first ALT tag of photos. The ALT tag repeats on each photo. More than 800 of 1100 images have yet to be indexed. Out of 290 property listings, 110 have yet to be indexed. CDN (Amazon) was supposed to be an improvement. It is turning into a nightmare. DOn't know if it is contributing to the drop in rank.
-My developer did not use useful ALT tags in the header. My name is used for two images. Very wasteful use of SEO real estate.
-In terms of general design, it looks aesthetic but I don't think it is clear to the visitor what they need to do. Very weak design. A nightmare, and an expensive one at that!!

Am I missing something really obvious about the site?

THANKS!!!
ALAN

[Chris.Menke]

• I'm not getting a  sense that you dealt properly with the transition from the old site to the new one.  Did you look  at the old site's back links and the search traffic it received and make decisions on the 301s that had to be implemented? If not read these:
• Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help
• Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz
• 301 Redirect Relevance

The things you're talking about aren't the typical topics involved in transitioning from an old site to a new one.  It may be best to relax a bit, make the decision to move forward with the new site and begin the process of learning the SEO process.  The benefit of using a wordpress site is that you can do most everything you need to do yourself, where your Drupal site wasn't that friendly.  Still, you'll have to understand what's what, as far as SEO, and proceed in an orderly fashion.  A good place to begin is with The SEO Guide From Moz.  You can still evolve the site into the one you want it to be but that won't happen by accident--you're going to have to develop your search marketing knowledge and apply it wisely--it's what your competitors are doing, you've just got to learn to do it better than they are.  Moz is a good place to figure out how to do that.

If I've misunderstood, and you're more advanced than that

[Kingalan1]

Hi Chris:

Thanks for your response.

301 redirects were implemented properly. The redirects were to pages that contained the same content as the original ones.

Previously out of 50 target phrases maybe 15 were in Google's top ten ranking. Now maybe 3 are.

You are probably right, no going back need to focus on improving the Wordpress site.

Thanks,
Alan