Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Great Fence,

I am only speaking from experience. I am not saying there will definitely be a dip. I am saying that anyone who is replatforming, particularly if they are re-writing URLs, they need to be prepared for a dip Perhaps it has to do with changing servers where your site is located (if I was Google, that would be a significant part of the equation).

There are no guarantees for sites one way or the other.

As a SEO who specializes in e-commerce I just want to make people aware that re-platforming might now solve all of your SEO woes overnight. You have to be patient.

Great Fence...if that 3-month dip led to double the traffic and conversions that you had before you re-platformed then it would all be worth it wouldn't it?

Some platforms are definitely better than others, but you need to be prepared to sacrifice a little and wait out the dip. If you've researched your choice well enough and made it taking into consideration your overall business goals, you should be fine.

I know that's not 100% reassuring, but if your business model is solid and your [products are good, you should be okay.

Dana

Hi Angela,

What are you seeing in your Google Webmaster Tools reports? 3dcart does have some unique SEO problems, but nothing that should be affecting you to this extent.

For example, you can't SEO 3DCArt's .asp pages nor can you properly SEO any blog posts.

However, I have a niche site on 3DCart that is doing quite well.

Your site is adorable and clearly unique.

I would be happy to take a look at it if you are willing to grant me view rights to your 3dcart backend I can tell you how to do that if you'd like, No charge. I just really like your site and would love to see you get back to where you were.

Please feel free to private message me or drop me an email at dtan@ccisolutions.com

First of all, I'd like to say, your sight is completely adorable!

Okay, that being said, I have a lot of experience in E-commerce. What platform were you on and what platform did you change to? Were there any changes is the URLs of your site? Did you do 301-redirects? Do you know for sure those 301-redirects were done properly?

I moved a very large site (5,000 SKUs) from self-hosting to Volusion in 2008. We had good traffic up to that point and then, for the first 3 months after we re-platformed everything tanked. But what happened next was quite remarkable. Our traffic skyrocketed and our conversion rate did the same.

Sites replatforming have to prepare themselves for a major "dip." But what happens after the dip could be really worth it. I know it's scary, but it could be that you are experiencing the "dip."

I am interested to know what e-commerce platform you were on and what you are on now. They allhave their own SEO challenges.  I have a lot of experience with Volusion and 3Dcart and some experience with Magento. I'll be interested to know where you were and where you are now. Cheers!

Dana

Hi Luke,

I think your idea is a good one. Another possibility would be "Birmingham Club Scene" or "Birmingham Night Clubs Talk" or anything that's a synonym for what you want. Change it up a little bit and make it fun.

Hey, I just browsed around your site. It' fun! I think you are doing a killer job. Aside from using more variety in your on-site language, stay the course man. I envy you having a site with UGC! (User Generated Content0.

I don't think the problem is the name os the locations. I think the problem is the over use of the term "nightlife." There are lots of synonyms for that, like "Night clubs" "night life" "night spot" "club" "tavern" etc. I really think the problem is with the over use of that word "nightlife"

I'd say one thing that could be causing this is domain age. Is the competitor's site significantly older and more well-established? Another factor could be your engagement. What's your bounce rate? This is definitely part of Google's algorithm. Are people finding what they want? Do you have on-site search? If so, are you getting a lot of searches with "zero" results? One last thing could be the number of years you've registered your domain. If you've registered yours for 2 and your competitor has registered their's for 10, that could be a factor.

One last thing. Where is your site hosted? Are you on a shared server? What is the reputation of the other sites sharing that server? If your competitor is on a dedicated server and you are on a shared server with other sites with questionable or low reputations, that could be dragging your site down.

I know that's a lot of factors, but each one could make a significant difference. Hope that helps a bit!

Dana

I once had a site hit by this hack too. It's maddening. Submitting a reinclusion request isn't necessary because your site hasn't been de-indexed. You are correct that the problem pages seem to be 404s now, which is good. You have a couple of options. You can either just wait it out and those 404 pages should eventually drop out of Google's index. This takes patience, but those 404s aren't really hurting you from an SEO standpoint. However, they aren't good from a a visitor standpoint. I understand that. The other option, which also requires some time and patience, is to submit the offending 404 pages via GWT's removal too. It's a bit of a pain because you have to do them one at a time. However, because you have succeeded in getting them to 404, you shouldn't have any trouble getting them removed from Google's index.

The removal request page can be found on GWT by navigating to "Optimization" and then click on "remove URLs" - The interface will keep track of which URLs you've submitted for removal and whether or not your attempt was successful.

Good luck and I hope this helps!

Dana

It's very important if you plan on doing any advertising at all, whether it's Google Adwords, Facebook or anywhere else. Aside from the fact that shorter domain names are just easier for your visitors to remember, many advertising networks have character limitations on display URLs. For example, Google Adwords has a 35 character limit for display URLs. You can have a longer URL, but it will be truncated in the ad, which isn't really what any advertiser wants to happen.

I'd say 35 characters or less for your domain name, counting characters like this:

MyDomainName.com

Don't count the "http://www."  part  in your character count because you can omit that from a display URL in an ad and people will still understand it and be able to navigate to your site.

I like your idea of posting them on a Facebook page. I think that's a great compromise in this situation.

Okay, so my response may have seemed flippant, but really, after everything we've learned in the last year I can't believe the discussion still is all about "what Google likes" and no one is talking about "what my readers like."

Ben, I went and looked at your blog and I think it's awesome. It's full of great content. If you have loyal followers, and they like your content, why on earth would it be a bad thing to say "Hey guys, I know you like my content, so here are some links where you can read some of the posts of written elsewhere." I think that's a cool idea. If you want to, make them "no follow" - I don't think it matters. Google is smart enough to see that you are an author referencing your other work. Readers love that. What's the first thing you see when you open up a book? You see a list of other books by the same author. Is that only self-promotion? I don't think so. You are making it easier for people who like your stuff to find more of it.

Forget about Google. Would your readers like it? I bet they would.

Understood. Yes, it's a bit of work (I just did over 550 removal requests myself), but I would proceed with removal requests. At least then you'll be able to see whether or not Google has actually removed them. Good luck!

Hi LL,

This might be a stupid question on my part, but are your catalog pages actually in Google's index yet? If not, obviously wait and see if the bots respect your "no index" direction. If they don't and those pages end up indexed, then submit the removal requests. No need to go through all that work if they aren't there.

If they are already indexed, then yes, I would submit the removal request.

I just wasn't sure if this is a brand new site or if you are working to resolve existing issues on an older site.

Dana

Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!

Did you pay for any featured links in any directories? Or perhaps maybe someone did this prior to you coming on board. I can't say for sure, but this is a very likely scenario. Again, focus more on the number and quality of your linking domains. I have seen fluctuations like this before and they aren't necessarily cause for concern.

For example, I am in house SEO for a company that does audio video installations. For a couple of months our products were picked up and listed in a trade magazine online. This temporarily inflated our links being reported in Webmaster Tools. Here's what that looked like. While this looks like a decrease, the number of linking domains actually has gone up:

<colgroup><col width="68"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| 4/17/2012 | 20,339 |
| 4/20/2012 | 20,156 |
| 5/1/2012 | 18,812 |
| 5/8/2012 | 17,576 |
| 5/15/2012 | 17,432 |
| 5/29/2012 | 16,280 |
| 6/7/2012 | 13,544 |
| 9/21/2012 |

13,362

|

Good question BB. Think about how news stories are published. Say you make page one for something. That news site might have 3 or 4 thousand pages. Say they have links to all the latest headlines on the right hand side of their template and that your news is in that list. As long as you are a headline, boom, you are linked from 3 or 4 thousand pages. As soon as your story is no longer front page, those links from all the pages go away and you retain just the one from the article that remain in their archive. In this scenario, you lost a lot of links, but you didn't lose any linking domains.

That being said, my guess is that you might have lost 100,000 links, but those links were from a small handful of linking root domains. If you lost 100,000 linking domains, that would be truly alarming. I am guessing that's not the case.

Hope that explanation made sense. What were you able to see in Ahrefs?

Any number of things could have happened William. How many links did you have before the drop. Some fluctuations are normal, especially if you released a new product or made it into a news story, your links can skyrocket for a time then settle back down. Or, it could be that you had a lot of links from bad directories that Google has de-indexed (same is true for blog networks, etc.)

Have you tried viewing your link profile in http://www.ahrefs.com ? You might get a better idea of what's going on if you look there. Interested to know what you see there? Hope that helps!

Dana

Yes. It is a recipe for disaster. The problem is it's still working for some people, which is frustrating I know. You mentioned that she has been using this team for the past few years. What does the site have to show for it? My guess is that there's no proof that the site is benefiting from all these low level spammy links.

You need to find a way to show her proof that it's not helping. Has she been tracking her traffic and domain authority over time? Is there a correlation between those things and the link-building activities, either good or bad?

The other thing that I would do is show her an example of what happens to a site when all of that goes South. There are tons of examples of those.

If none of that works and you can't convince her that her business is too important to play games with, I'd maybe leave her to do the damage herself. You don't want that on your shoulders when you eventually move on to clients who do #RCS  [Real Company Stuff]

I am very interested to know something Mr. Johnson. If you believe SEO is dead, what are you doing now instead of SEO to promote your site?

It sounds to me like you were sold on the idea that doing business on the Internet was going to be fast, easy money. Once you found out it was hard work with no guarantee of success, same as starting a business anywhere else (maybe harder), you got ticked off.

Did you give up. Or are you still at it? If you're still at it, now that you've abandoned SEO, what are you doing to be successful with your site?

Have you tried reversing the words? As an experiment, I would create a subcategory page or even a landing page for "Bed Head- - Tigi" - My assumption is that Google is seeing you place more emphasis on Tigi branded products. I know Bed Head products because my kids use them. They call them "Bed Head" and never refer to them as "Tigi."  I think it might be worth testing that assumption with a landing page campaign reversing the words. Just a though!

Dana