I hope this information will help others on this forum, and also would appreciate any suggestions / ideas you have.
On February 19th I split off a large chunk (approximately 125 URLs out of a total of 300 URLs) of content from Site A to Site B to better focus both sites and remove some duplicate content. Both are ecommerce sites
Before the 19th of February, Site A had two main types of content: women's clothing, and Eastern Religious Items (they don't really go very well together, and there was not much cross-selling between the two types).
Site A is a ten year old site and had some backlinks (probably less than 100 total followable links). None from anything that was over a PR4, as far as I can tell. The majority of the backlinks were from Eastern Religious themed sites, plus a handful of clothing / fashion sites.
Site B is a year-and-a-half old site that has JUST the Eastern Religious Items. The items were the same as the times already for sale on Site A. However, I rewrote the titles and descriptions so that they would (hopefully) not be thought of as duplicate content by google. There are probably only about 35 inbound links to Site B - most of them reciprocal, most from low PR pages.
Despite Site B being newer than Site A, and having less total products than Site A, Site B did get about 15% more visits than Site A. This is probably due to lots of informational articles on Site B.
On the 19th I removed the Eastern Religious items from site A and 301 redirected the pages to the appropriate pages that already existed on Site B. There are no more internal navigation links on Site A to the pages which have been 301'd to site B. There is one outbound link on the home page of Site A to Site B and an explanation saying that the Eastern Religious Items have been moved to Site B.
It was, admittedly, not a clean break;
1) many URLs were not 301'd immediately and took about a week to 10 days to get done.
2) Some of them were chained 301 redirects.
3) Some were to the wrong pages
4) The new URls are not exactly the same as the old ones
I have measured the visits in google analytics from the time after the redirects up till now (Feb 19th to Mar 23rd), and compared that with the time period immediately before the break (Jan 17th to Feb 18th)and here is what they show:
Total Visits to BOTH sites combined:
Jan 17 - Feb 18: 32,117
Feb 19 - Mar 23: 29,740
Change: -7.4%
Change in Visits Site A: -47.22%
Change In visits Site B: +23.26%
Change in Pages Per Visit Site A: +12.5%
Change in Pages Per Visit Site B: +7.22%
Change in Time On Site, Site A: +21.95%
Change in Time On Site, Site B: +6.87%
I am encouraged by the increase in pages per visit and time on site, despite the 7.4% decrease in total number of visitors.
Sales, unfortunately, are down significantly. I don't have a metric for that. Let's just say, "a lot."
So, my question is, where do I go from here?
1) What metrics do I need to analyze to develop the right strategy moving forward?
2) Should I refrain from adding products / content until google has a chance to sort things out?
3) Should I focus on link building to improve my admittedly crappy backlink profile?
4) Should I go into full panic mode due to the 7.4% drop in overall traffic and sharp decline in sales, undo all the 301 redirects, put the products and categories I had removed from Site A back on to Site A, and just pretend the whole thing never happened?
If you have any experience doing something like this, I would love to hear your experience was.
Thanks in advance.
