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Hello Fellow Forum Members:

Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this.

• Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform.  We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings.
• By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site.
• As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%.
• Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently.
• In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with.
• By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more.
• Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best.

So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform?

We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.

Thanks @iPullRank.  There are so many moving parts here and we have decided it is just beyond our understanding to get this fixed.  We've decided to work with the folks at Portent Interactive to start a long term fix.  Thank you, everyone, for your feedback and assistance. If there is one thing I've learned it's that we need to be working with trustworthy folks like those within the Moz community.

Will do, thanks Matt. We have quite a bit in this new design, so we are staying with the platform. BC is great as far as uptime, etc. We actually left Volusion after 6 years to move here.

Thank you Matt!

They (BC) are not a ton of help and there seems to be multiple issues. The last two techs, no joke, have said "listen, if I were an SEO expert I wouldn't be sitting here"... what kind of service is that?

I am going to talk to the developer that built the site (Madwire Media) and see what they can do, if anything.

This article makes complete sense Matt.  I don't have the ability, that I'm aware of, to edit the canonical tags used by Big Commerce. They automatically generate those for all products and categories.  Funny as it seems, they do NOT have the canonical tag in the home page which is a separate can of worms I am dealing with.

I will read all of those articles. I do know, based on some other issues we're having, that the things I may have access to edit in BigCommerce are limited. Hopefully these articles have some information I can use.

Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss.  While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful...

Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages.

I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform.

Thank you for taking the time to read my question!

Thank you everyone for your response.  So as a manufacturer, I am far from an SEO guy. Would it behoove me to go with an expert to review?

Additionally, as far as SEO companies, we didn't switch, we just quit using.  We used one that I thought was top-shelf, but they did many blackhat techniques and actually hurt our rankings during the one Google update - this was in 2011.  Rankings improved after we quit using them.

I think the content on the new site is good.  The old site had tons of keyword stuffing, so we cleaned up our descriptions so they read more human-like.

Hi Bryan:

I did submit the new sitemap to Google and all the pages appear to be indexed, they are just ranking way, way lower.

I did notice there are a lot of 404's listed in webmaster tools, but a lot of those are from old products we discontinued. The design company told me those won't hurt anything, but I am not sure.

This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience.

Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure.

Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms.

I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible.

Now I have no idea where to even begin.  Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%!

Any insight is very, very much appreciated.