Moved Site Dropped Like a Rock

[DansSitesRScrewed]

Hi all,

We just moved a website and within 3 days it dropped like a rock on rankings for all our keywords. I had expected it to drop a little, but my question is, how long does it typically take for Google to re-index the site with the new urls and hopefully we climb back up?

We did all 301s properly and the site's coding is all good as far as I can tell.

Thanks
Dan

[Robert Charlton]

Dan, sorry to hear about the problems.

In my experience, simply moving a site, keeping the same domain, design, and structure, but simply changing servers, scarcely produces even a hiccup. A little bit depends on where your DNS changes needed to be made, but DNS propagation is fast enough these days that recovery should be very fast.

Changing a domain name, though, can add to that considerably, particularly if accompanied by other changes. Please advise on what changes were made, some history of the site and why you moved it, and give us a timeline. Describe how you moved it as well, etc, and give us some technical overview.

What was the timing in relationship to the "Page Layout Algorithm" update, which happened ~Feb 6th? [webmasterworld.com...]

Also, we've had some previous discussions about problems with your other site(s). If we've discussed the particular site here, please let us know which thread that was.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

Hey Robert, thanks for the response.

We had several changes, the domain name stayed the same, however alot of the urls did not. Hence the 301s.
We also went from a Miva cart to a magento cart. The functionality of the miva cart was becoming too limited for our needs.

The site is around 10 years old and did very well with some terms, etc.

That is a very good question about the Page Layout Algorithm, Have NO clue.

Yes you are absolutely correct about issues with our other sites. I am afraid maybe that is a small percentage of the problem, but it just seems so obvious to me that this was because of the move. And this site is not one of the others in which I have discussed before.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

I am also seriously wondering if there is an issue with the Magento ecommerce cart to begin with. Maybe Google does not like this php cart system.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

Also we are not running adsense on any of our pages. So the Page Layout Algorithm hopefully did not apply to us.

[aristotle]

the domain name stayed the same, however alot of the urls did not.

Did you change the site's internal structure and/or its internal linking pattern?

The title of the thread suggests that the rankings drop was caused by "moving" the site, but apparently it was more than just a "move". In any case, when you make several major changes at the same time, it can be hard to determine which change(s) caused the drop.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

Yes we modified the internal linking pattern. The old site was structured differently. I couldn't see a way to keep the internal linking pattern exactly the same.

[netmeg]

I do a lot with Magento. If all your ducks are in a row, it should come back. Last time I did a migration from OSCommerce to Magento, it took maybe three weeks, possibly four, and it came back better than ever. But I also prepped the hell out of it for six weeks before launch.

- Made sure every page had a unique title and meta description (times 2500 products)

- Every single URL from the old structure had a corresponding 301. I believe we had a second instance of Apache just for serving the 301s, but I don't remember.

- We had a dev server, and I found every parameter the site put out ahead of time and made sure they were blocked in robots.txt - and I submitted the robots.txt for the new site 48 hours before we flipped the switch.

- Implemented rel=canonical for all product pages, and no-indexed any duplicate categories.

- Filled out all the parameter info in GWT so they'd know how to deal with any parameters that did make it into the index.

- Didn't rely on Magento's native sitemap generation, but wrote our own so we weren't submitting files that we didn't want in the index.

And a bunch of little stuff here and there.

It went very well. Inside of a month we were where we started.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

netmeg. Good to know. I'm getting nervous that all my ducks were not in a row. I thought I covered every possible thing. We 301ed all the pages. There was a few cases that we we're doing away with some pages, so I just redirected them to the next most relevant page.

Just out of curiosity, have you seen any issues in the way of SEO with magento that I should be aware of? We have customized themes, etc. But just wondering if you have encountered anything out of the norm for magento.

[DansSitesRScrewed]

netmeg, another question would be, how far did you drop? And was the return gradual or happened quickly?

[netmeg]

We didn't drop far, and the return was gradual.

The canonical stuff wasn't built in; we had to use an extension. And I had some developers give us some custom fields, so I could NOINDEX anything I wanted to. But other than that, it wasn't any worse than any other shopping cart, and a lot better than some.

Also read that blog post on Google Webmaster Central about faceted navigation. Navigation is important.