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Thanks Alex.  I will have to look at how big of an undertaking it will be I suppose.

I guess I am trying to figure out if all new posts should go to the new /blog area and leave the old blog where it is.  Another concern of mine is that our blog is simply the free generic template whereas the new /blog area looks like our site because it is part of our site.  Not sure if I relayed that well or not.

Thanks Jennifer! The only thing I am not sure about is how to do that. Our blog is hosted by Wordpress on their servers so I don't know if I can upgrade or something and then redirect.  I know there is also a WP Site Redirect upgrade I can purchase from WP for $13/year.  Maybe that's the way to go?

So that begs the question, do we switch this existing blog to the /blog address now and redirect old posts? I am assuming all new posts should go to the new /blog area.

Our e-commerce site has been on Big Commerce for about a year now. One thing many SEO folks had told us is that having a blog located at /blog was going to help more than a subdomain blog. option.

BC has never had the option to have a blog hosted on their platform (/blog) until now.

I am now wondering, since we have lost traffic in the past and are trying everything we can to regain it, if we should purchase the Wordpress Site Redirect upgrade and move the subdomain blog (blog.) to the new site option /blog.

Any help or feedback from you is very much appreciated.  I have attached a screenshot of our main website vs. our blog from Open Site Explorer in case it helps anything.

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I will try that.  Thank you Erik for your input.

You're correct Erik.  The only backup I did of my Volusion site was the customers, products and sale reports. My Volusion account was closed on 6/15 so that restore is not an option.

I also understand what you're saying about yet another move and the issues that could come with that. You've given me a lot to think about here.  Thank you.

Thank you Erik, I understand what you are saying.  These are things I did not know which is why I had hired the company to handle the migration.  They came highly recommended from BC and I trusted that they would do this stuff all the time. I make equipment for dogs, which I am good at.  I know that I know nothing about full website migrations, but I believed a trusted BC partner would.

The 269 in my example was the Volusion category ID, not the SKU.

Identifying these things in Analytics is not what I would call easy for me. I can tell I am going to have to learn a lot more about this subject if I want to understand things which is why I joined this community. The first order of business is to get our site back where it was. Does it sound to you like it can be addressed on the current platform?

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!

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.

You can see why I'm so confused!

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

We were looking at the Magento Community Edition, although I know we'll still have development costs.

The recommendation I've been given was to stay away from all hosted cart solutions: Volusion, Bigcommerce, 3dCart, Shopify, etc.

Thank you Jesse for your response.  Yes, our PPC campaigns have been what has been keeping us afloat.  We have managed to keep our business alive, albeit in a much more expensive way.

When you say bite the bullet and rebuild, do you feel the Wordpress option or Magento option is a better place to begin research?

Thanks Dennis.

The links mostly pointed to our home page and some of our main category pages, so those did redirect accordingly. We also saw a slight decline in during the Google updates, but had recovered most of the way from those. In GA, it is easy to see the traffic drop begins when our redesign launched.

You said, "If you are sure that the technical issues are the main cause for your drops, then you better move it.". To be honest, that's what we can't figure out.  Did the lack of comprehensive 301's which caused a lot of 404's cause this, or our platform choice.  That's what we don't know but are trying to figure out before we make a big move.

Our product catalog is probably around 600+ products right now but will be heading into the thousands by year's end.

Don't know if this response helps at all or not.