SEO disaster after upgrade - help please!

[Andrew H]

I recently upgraded to 1.5 from 1.1.

 

I had 3 languages as part of the store.

 

Because the new version of the store wanted to put my primary language into a sub folder (which I think is probable SEO suicide), I instead disabled the two extra languages (they weren't particularly complete anyway).

 

Today I noticed I had lost my number one position (down to about the 3rd page!) on all my keywords, absolutely everything. Most products don't appear in google at all now!

 

I checked in google webmasters today and there are about 2400 not found errors! However, these are mostly for subfolder pages that are not even used under the /en/ language.

 

The only other thing I can think MIGHT have caused this (I'm not sure) is I activated the canonical URL function -if the theme isn't compatible (I don't know if it is), would it cause this kind of issue?

 

In hope of at least getting back some of my google position, I've rolled back to my old prestashop store and submitted the old sitemap back to google until I can understand why this happened.

 

Thanks

Andrew

Edited August 18, 2013 by Andrew H (see edit history)

[Andrew H]

(update) Looking at the new site offline, I realised the site generated 404s to all pages with canonical URLs deactivated (which I know isn't normal behaviour). I switched it off, recompiled the template and now the new site works with canonical URLs deactivated. I'm wondering if google was somehow seeing one version of the site structure and in reality another was live... Is that possible?

 

I read this article which indicates this functionality (if not implemented correctly) can cause more trouble than it solves. Can anyone verify this to be the case (and if this could be the cause in my case)? http://dailyseotip.c...ical-links/992/ Basically, I need to better understand what it means that the Canonical deactivation meant all links were 404s -but only to google. This is the really strange thing as all the page URLs on the new site exactly mirror those of the old.

 

I really would appreciate some paid consultancy time (maybe 2 hours or so -or whatever's necessary) with someone who better understands this as it's too great a risk for me to put the site back live again and potentially make my dire SEO situation even worse than it already is. I'm happy to post back the resolution here.

 

thanks again

Andrew

Edited August 18, 2013 by Andrew H (see edit history)

[alastairbrian]

Instead of using canonical use 301 redirection and redirect all your 404 pages to new URLs.

[Andrew H]

thanks for your answer, I really appreciate it. How would I do that?

 

The problem was that I think canonical got a bit messed up in my installation as when I swtiched it off, I was getting 404s to all pages. I recompiled the template (after I'd taken the problem site offline) and this seemed to correct this problem -but I'm not expert enough on this subject to determine whether this in fact was the root cause of my errors in google webmasters.

 

As it appears to me, I think google thought languages were enabled but they weren't since I had literally 1000s of not found errors on pages in /en/ folder even though on the front end this wasn't enabled and all the pages were in fact IDENTICAL URLs to the original site. I've been deindexed on nearly everything on google. Do you think this is due to the 2400 not found errors in google webmasters (even though these pages were not actually live) -if that makes sense?

 

About 300 of the 404error pages in webmasters were also various different forms of this, based on the home page:

 

http://www.examplesite.com/index.php?controller=category_rule&id=190&rewrite=product-name-here&meta_keywords=&meta_title=

 

This web address just takes me to my home page of my old site but creates a 404 on the new one. I'm confused what this page is and why Google has 100s of different products listed like this.

 

 

 

thanks

Andrew

Edited August 19, 2013 by Andrew H (see edit history)

[billkou]

You might lose rank instantly but once the new pages get indexed again, you will be back up in the positions you were before the problem. It has happened to me as well on a different website and it took some days to recover, but I had no problems after all. I also had many thousand 404 error URL's, for which the best solution is 301 redirects on the webserver so that the indexed pages don't get lost from the google search rankings.

 

But if your website is crawled regularly ( i.e. it's healthy and google visits it often according to the settings of your sitemap ) the old pages that provide 404 error will be deleted in a matter of days and the new ones will be up.

[Andrew H]

Hi Billkou -I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

 

I think you might be right actually. However, a glitch with the canonical feature I think seriously messed things up as google thought the site was in the /en/ folder where in fact it was actually at root (only one language enabled). I'm installing an SEO module to redirect any 404s. Hopefully this will address that issue.

 

thanks again.

[billkou]

Hello

 

You don't need to install a SEO module just to redirect the /en folder to root.

 

A simple redirect inside the apache/nginx configuration and you're set. ( I don't know how to do it because I don't mess with redirects and anything related to mysql for security/uptime reasons on my shop )

 

I think you could save your money by asking/searching on the internet for such a simple redirect! If you're talking about numerous other 404's that you need to manage then the module could be useful I suppose.