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c_russell
Joined: May 28, 2008
# Posts: 5
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Posted: 2008-May-28 17:03
Name of Site/Business: Elegala.com - Elegant Galas Made Simple
Site's Main Purpose: Information
Please Review the following:
Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?
Additional Comments/Notes
We relaunched the site in Jan. 08 and transferred articles to expressionengine - which changed the urls (we used 301 redirects) - and we now have two main sections
We used to get over 100,000 visitors per month but have fallen dramatically and have not increased traffic since the Jan. relaunch (it's actually continued to decrease). I just want to make sure there isn't a larger problem than simply waiting to ride out the effects of the relaunch and url changes.
[ Message was edited by: OAC 05/29/2008 02:15 am ... Reason: No URLs or links in posts as per forum rules ]
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Quadrille
Joined: Nov 15, 2000
# Posts: 1064
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Posted: 2008-May-28 17:49
You mean you have moved much of your content from a successful site at www.elegala.com/ to a totally new site at
resources.elegala.com/local/ - and still allow people to access the site via elegala.com/
The search engines will treat the 'local' site as a new site (because it is). There seems to be a fair bit of forwarding; if it is anything other than a 301 redirect, you are adding to your woes.
If the relaunch was that violent, it is likely that the site on the original domain is also treated as a new site.
You then add insult to injury by sending people back and forth between the two sites. I'm confused, your visitors are confused - and it's a fair bet that SEs are too.
Looks a like a mixture of seo suicide and sick site syndrome!
My advice is to shoot whoever planned the relaunch, and when you appoint a new person/company, have tattooed on their forehead "ONE site at domain.com, DO not divide the site across two domains, DO NOT use subdomains for key stuff."
I'm sorry to be so flip about a serious matter - but your site is a mess, and a mess created and paid for by your company.
There is also a bit of a question mark over your business model; if the site is effectively a classified ads site (folk paying to be listed), then Google will likely be treating them as paidlinks; unless you adopt nofollow. And if you adopt nofollow, buyers will get referrals, but no 'seo juice', and so may look elsewhere.
If you choose NOT to use nofollow, then you'll also need to be very fussy who's money you take; choosing to link to bad sites will not only damage your reputation (and reduce direct referrals), it may also get your site into a bad neighbourhood.
Your URLs currently display strong page rank - but that can be deceptive; for a start, it's 3-5 months out of date, not current, and worse, if you've worked with someone with a pagerank obsession, they may well have neglected issues that matter much, much more than page rank - like unique, quality content. Many of your pages (at a quick skim) seem to have very little for the SEs to work with.
Finally, I tried five random searches from your menu - ALL came back with "No results found."
It needs sorting and soon.
In your favour, I found only one deadlink - and that was a site which works only on the WWW (silly them!), which you'd omitted.
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mj1256
Staff
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 980
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Posted: 2008-May-28 18:49
what a mess.
I would restore the site to the way it was when you had traffic and start the new design over again, the right way.
and...
site developers don't generally know or build sites for SEO, so get a second opinion on everything.
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c_russell
Joined: May 28, 2008
# Posts: 5
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Posted: 2008-May-28 19:12
Our company is not in a situation where we can invest any money in redesigning the site. Any ideas on possible ways to minimize the negative effects without redesigning and entire site?
[ Message was edited by: c_russell 05/29/2008 06:54 am ]
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mj1256
Staff
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 980
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Posted: 2008-May-28 23:44
if your designer did not keep a back up of the previous site he should be fired.
lowest cost situation is to restore the site to the way it was before all of the changes. At least then you can possibly get your traffic and rankings back
if there is no backup, plan on spending money and doing a rebuild. everything from navigation to server setup is at issue. if your developer does not know what we have been telling you, he is not qualified to fix this.
what negative effects could be worse than what you currently have. what ever you do will involve down time, but a properly designed site in the long run is always the way to go.
I hope you don't find me too harsh, but over and over we hear about a developer or designer that has destroyed a site and the owner of the site continues to go back to to that developer or designer. If the developer or designer knew what they were doing these people wouldn't have these issues.
how many times do you have to put your hand into an open flame before you realize that it will hurt
Quad and others have told you what to do. fire the developer and do a redesign.
[ Message was edited by: mj1256 05/29/2008 06:09 am ]
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c_russell
Joined: May 28, 2008
# Posts: 5
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Posted: 2008-May-29 04:03
Thank you for your help (even though the news is not good!). In case this sheds light on why the subdomain was created - this is the reasoning:
In order to integrate the two halves of Elegala, we need to put the Rails app on a subdomain of elegala.com. Technically, when you say "www.elegala.com", the "www" portion is a subdomain. We need to come up with a second name for the rails portion.
Thus - resources.elegala.com was created.
[ Message was edited by: c_russell 05/29/2008 08:40 am ]
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