Richard,

Quick question on this.  If the URL's (such as the one you referenced above) are from years ago and have been redirected via the SEO URL tool on my old site ever since, wouldn't Google etc have removed them from their cache and replaced them with the SEO Friendly URLs that we had in place since 2008?  I guess I'm just wondering if there really is such a "hole" since I'm not really seeing many 404 URLS in Google Webmaster Tool crawl report.

Said differently, does Google really "save" all of the URLs that you've ever had and check those regularly to see if they are no longer redirected?

Thanks,

Chris

Cyto,
Quick question on this.  If the URL's are from years ago and have been redirected ever since, wouldn't Google etc have removed them from their cache and replaced them with the SEO Friendly URLs that we had in place since 2006?  I guess I'm just wondering if there really is such a "hole" since I'm not really seeing many 404 URLS in Google Webmaster Tool crawl report.

Said differently, does Google really "save" all of the URLs that you've ever had and check those regularly to see if they are no longer redirected?

Thanks,

Chris

Cyto,

Thanks again - I will dig into that redirection hole and see what I can come up with!

Chris

Monica - thank you for the great input.  I too wonder if some of this might be Penguin, although looking at my traffic profile over the past year I'm thinking that Richard is right, that there might be a Panda component to my problem also.

I'm not quite sure where to start for linking with a B2B E-Com business (office furniture).  It's pretty hard to create link bait for a overhead projector cart   I'm definitely open to recommendations, and would be even more excited for a referral to a firm that could help with that.

One more note: I did upload a disavow file with about 100 domains on it in June of 2014.  I suppose it's possible that it could have coincidentally taken effect around the time of the site migration...  But I wouldn't expect it to lower impressions?

Richard - this is immensely helpful for sure.  I looked at the wrong htaccess earlier today.  Here is a section from the correct .htaccess that I think identifies with what you are referring to:

From Ultimate SEO URLs

RewriteRule ^(.)-p-(.).html$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-c-(.).html$ index.php?main_page=index&cPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-m-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pi-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=popup_image&pID=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pr-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=product_reviews&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
RewriteRule ^(.)-pri-([0-9]+).html$ index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

You are correct - there is a plug-in in the old ZenCart site that created the "seo friendly URLs".  I think it created a database table to matrix the Zen Cart internal page ID's against it's calculated SEO friendly URLS (that's what this redirect looks like to me - see above.
Do you think all is lost because of the amount of time that it's been since the migration, or do you think if I can mine the original database and recreate the ID -> Old URL mapping as new 301 redirects, I might recover this?  Makes me sick to my stomach to think that we lost reputation from pre-2008!

Thank you for the continued conversation!

Hi Cyto - the Moz crawl diagnostic shows a few 404 errors, some titles and meta descriptions that are too long/short, and a few missing meta descriptions.  No duplicate content on the new site is listed.

Yes - Google can crawl the site and Webmaster Tools says 793 of the 801 URLs in my sitemap are indexed.

Richard - thanks so much for the quick reply.  I did consider the proximity to the Penguin 3.0 release, but this incident took place the third week of September (2 weeks after a major site revamp) and my records show Penguin 3.0 showed up about a month later, on Oct 17?

Great question on the redirects in the older htaccess file - I did check them and there were none to speak of.  If there were, once 301 redirects are read by Google, aren't they stored as permanent by the search engine, even if they are removed from the site's htaccess?

Hi Zora,

The search term is the actual brand name...

So search is "brandname" and the site is www.brandname.com.

Try searching for "coca-cola"....  Same result...  Maybe I'm using a bad example?  General Motors (same thing)...

"SeoMoz" looks good - maybe it really IS markup?

Hi All,

Perhaps it's been like this all along (I don't think so) but can someone tell me why some pages with Google sitelinks now look like this (see the "Coke" search) while others look like this (see the "Amazon" search image).

Is this because of Rich Snippet use?

One of my client's SiteLinks used to resemble the Amazon one, but now resembles the Coke one (not preferred).

Any input?

Thanks,

Chris

Elevated Synergy Group - SEO

coke.png amazon.png

The site is actually not penalized by Google (I've already communicated with them).  It's just lost major traction in the the SERP.

The root domain has a lot of links, but there are two category pages which are hit the hardest, and one of them is the "bread and butter" category, which makes it hard to re-engineer for another set of search terms.

I really do think removing as many of these links as possible is the way to go, just looking to see if there was a better way other than counting on the good graces of the webmasters for the spammy sites or the original firm that created the links?