Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch

[SoItGoes]

In a nutshell, we've moved all our sites over to a new platform this year (with a new template, on-page optimizations, etc.), but a few of them haven't seen much (if any) recovery from the change, and it's been 4-5 months already. One site in particular is having issues I'm not seeing anywhere else - when I look at our Moz reports, the majority of keywords that are ranking are only ranking the https version of the homepage (it looks like the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October. Interestingly, the beginning of October is also where WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions. We're still working with our dev team to implement proper canonical tags for the https page, since some pages are secure, and others aren't).

I don't think we're seeing a technical issue, since no other sites are having this problem and they're all basically copied from the same template. I've crawled the site, etc., and nothing has come up from that, and I've done a site search and Google shows all the pages have been indexed. I've also done a year over year landing page/categories analysis, which shows that organic traffic to the homepage had increased a lot and categories (and products) completely dropped.

We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem. The only other pages that are ranking are a few gender neutral pages that also existed on the old site. The navigation was drastically changed from product types (Boots vs. Shoes) to being gender specific (Men's Boots, Women's Boots, etc.). Other sites that we've relaunched have new category pages that are ranking, but I don't think any other navigation changed as much as this one.

I've gone down a bunch of rabbit holes trying to figure this out and keep hitting dead ends. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what happened or what else I should look into?

[martinibuster]

Did URLs change and/or were additional URLs created when you created navigation for gender specific pages?

[not2easy]

Hello SoItGoes, welcome to the forums! From your description, the first place I would check is in the "Search Console" (was GWT) to be sure you have both versions listed as separate sites. The http and https versions are viewed as two distinct sites by Google. You want to ensure that you have submitted a sitemap for each version and that the same URLs do not appear on both sitemaps. Also check to see that only one version of each URL can be accessed and that all rewrites return a 301 response and not a 302 prior to serving the request with a 200 response.

The two versions of the site should mirror changes so that drops on the http: version also show increases on the https: version. This would indicate that the changes are going as planned.

The old categories that were split into multiple new categories and no longer exist could be an issue depending on if and how the URLs changed. If example.com/Boots/tough-hiker-boots.html and example.com/Boots/slim-style-boots.html are now in two different categories there could be confusion at /Boots/ URLs if the rewrites aren't handled well. Are the rewrites being handled by the platform/CMS or manually? Have you used tools to check the navigation links?

[SoItGoes]

@martinibuster - new URLs were created for the gender specific pages. The dual gender/gender neutral pages that were carried over to the new site mostly stayed the same, except for a handful that didn't have SEO friendly URLs (it looks like a lot of these old pages used a filter. I started around the time all this was happening, so I'm learning more about how the old sites were set up as I'm digging into the history). Essentially, we're dealing with mostly new URLs.

@not2easy - thanks for the tip! We don't have the https versions in Search Console I'm guessing because the original plan was to have most https instances redirected to the http version, but it definitely makes sense to track that. I do know that probably toward the end of September, the dev team implemented a fix so all 302s are now 301s. We used a redirect checker to make sure this went through, as well as ScreamingFrog, and they seem to be registering correctly as 301s.

Rewrites to the URLs were originally done by the CMS (the slug took on the name of the category, rather than a filter. So if the page was named men-footwear-shoes, that's what the URL was). However, most of these were slightly altered manually before the site went live. So something like men-footwear-shoes would be changed to mens-shoes. I haven't used any tools to check the navigation links, but now I'm starting to search around for one. Are there any in particular that you recommend?

[not2easy]

ScreamingFrog is at the top of the list: [webmasterworld.com...] and though that thread is from 2013, it gets mentioned in the forums frequently enough to see that the tool is still very popular. I do not use it myself, there are many members here who do use it whose judgement I respect. It is my understanding that ScreamingFrog has a limited free version to try out, but the toolbox with teeth is a paid service. There is a free Link Checker tool in the WWF free tools section linked to in the footer.

[martinibuster]

If you've verified that old URLs are 301'ning to the new URLs, then obviously the link equity is passing along.If you've verified that old URLs are 301'ning to the new URLs, then obviously the link equity is passing along. We should look elsewhere.

Sometimes when I've lost something like my keys around my house and it's not located in any of the usual places that's when I look in the unusual places, like inside the refrigerator. Sometimes it helps to check the Robots.txt to see if you're blocking something that should not be blocked (a common web dev error created when staging a site). In the case of a WordPress install check the Yoast SEO settings because a common mistake is to enable "noindex, follow" tag, (which of course shouldn't be there, and "index,follow" is superfluous because that's the default).

[netmeg]

(And one of the great things about Screaming Frog is that it will tell you all that and more about how your site looks to Google)

BTW are you seeing the same sort of thing in Bing?

[tangor]

When I have moved a site from http to https I have done all pages at the same time. Not sure whether a mix of http and https might be involved, but it might be something to address.

[SoItGoes]

@netmeg From what I'm seeing in Bing, I'm seeing something similar in that there has been a decrease in clicks and most of the new category pages aren't really getting many clicks/impressions. But it's not as drastic as Google's data.