I just switched to Premium Responsive Design.

All of the site content stayed the same. The only meta tags I'm using is the Title, Description and Keywords.

My Google indexed pages immediately dropped from 4100 pages down to 800 pages.

Google WM Tools doesn't show anything drastic, although I did receive this Message from Google (in WMT)

"New index coverage issue detected for site..."

Has anyone else experienced this after switching to the Premium Responsive Design? Everything looks good to me, but obviously something major happened. is this normal or am I missing something quite important?

Thanks

Hi

I don't think it's something particularly related to switching to a responsive design but more a case of simply switching to a new layout. I'm sure Google's crawler will recognize that and will be keen to hoover up the new content. I imagine the site is a state of "flux" as new content is spidered and old content is dropped - I assume that's what you're seeing right now.

Regarding the message in WMT have a look here and go through their checks https://www.blogsaays.com/fix-index-coverage-issues-google-search-console/ - let us know what you find or if you have any questions.

Andy

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Thanks Andy,

I noticed after submitting my new sitemap to Google, the proddetail pages were showing the product ID in the url as opposed to showing the product name. My old site showed the product name in the url so I made the edit and resubmitted the sitemap. Perhaps that will make a difference.

Checking on the WMT message, it appears that 3,170 pages were excluded from indexing due to a redirect issue. I'm not sure what the redirect issue may be. Maybe it was the move to the new server? Perhaps it is the new SSL redirecting to the secure pages? It seems to be affecting my products and proddetail pages most of all.

1,783 pages were crawled but not indexed, however no reason was given that I can find.
1,643 pages - duplicate pages without canonical tag (not indexed)
1,253 pages crawled but not currently indexed (no reason given - perhaps in limbo)
Altogether there are 8.1 thousand pages that were dropped from Google

I took a look at WMT this morning and my indexed pages grew slightly from 800 to just over 900. Maybe Google is just trying to get used to the new site. However, the main thing that concerns me is the 3,170 pages not being indexed due to a redirect issue. I suppose I'll wait a few days and see if this still remains an issue.

That combination of https and detail page name change would make sense. I would keep an eye on it over the coming days and see what is then being reported.

Andy

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Checking WMT again this morning, my indexed pages have fallen to just under 300. That's a heck of a hit - went from 8+ thousand indexed pages to less than 300 in just under a week.

I resubmitted my pages for validation and am waiting for Google to revalidate.

I'm not sure what the problem was but something major happened when I switched to the new server and template. All the site content remained the same. I have fewer meta tags now - just title, descr and keywords. Maybe I should add a few more? It would be really nice if Google would tell you exactly what the problem is and how to resolve it but they leave you guessing.

I just wanted to give an update on this issue since some time has passed.

The "Indexed Pages" I was referring to was my Google Site Map indexed pages.

When I made the switch to the new template, the indexed pages dropped by the thousands. After a few weeks, the indexed pages rose to about 3300. However since then it has dropped back down to about 2900. It is currently dropping about 100 pages/day. I still cannot figure out why this is happening.

I see that this seems to be a common thing when searching this issue on the web. Major changes to websites can cause indexed pages to be dropped. However, it should have gone back up by now (I believe).

One common thread I've found inquiring about this in SEO forums is "paginated pages". Apparently this seems to be a no-no in the SEO world. All of my product detail pages are paginated i.e. - "Previous/Next"

I'm going to remove the Previous/Next links on my detail pages and see if that makes any difference at all. I'm wondering if anyone has tried this here, and if so...did it help?

I'm sure that will not make my indexed pages to rise back up to the 8k mark where it was but I'm hoping it will help a little.

If anyone has any other suggestions, please share the wealth

I certainly wouldn't remove the Previous / Next links - your customers will find them useful and they have no negative effects whatsoever on the number of pages indexed on your site - if anything they help search find pages. I think your site is still in flux after changing designs.

If you're looking for articles and suggestions on the topic, make sure you can go to more reputable sites and read up well before deciding to make any changes.

Here's a starting point https://blog.kissmetrics.com/alarm-signals-for-seo/

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

You may find that this "Previous/Next" is more an issue on the products pages than the proddetail page as generally, the page title on the products pages remains the same. Given what you said about the number of products, I suspect you may have hundreds of pages with the same title and description. There is a thread regarding this. One solution was having the page number added to the <title> and <description> to change it just enough to make the pages seem different. If you are running ASP, the code would be


Then add this to the <title> and <description>


Unfortunately, I cannot find the original thread. But I think you get the idea.

Marshall
CENLYT Productions - ms designs
Affordable Web Design
Custom Ecommerce Designs
Responsive Websites
Cenlyt.com

A useful read on SEO & Pagination

[url]https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/[/url]



Will
Bolton Manchester UK

I think it's worth pointing out here that at the same time as going for a new responsive design, the site was taken 100% SSL. The result of that is ALL the URLs have changed and it's expected that indexing will take a knock after that. There's a handy checklist from sinbad here https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/support/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=106851 (just the first post, ignore the rest) to make sure all is as it should be after doing that.

Peter

ServeLink
Professional ecommerce web hosting for ASP & PHP
https://servelink.com

Take a look at our image upload/resize tool for the ASP cart
https://servelink.com/clients/cart.php?gid=7

Thanks for all the replies!

I don't think I have any pages with the same title/description. These are all Product Detail pages (from my Google site map) that I am referring to. To have even 2 pages with the same Title would render one of those pages useless. Knowing that going into my store, I made sure I didn't have any duplicate Titles.

The Pagination issue was posted in a Google.com forum as well as a few other reputable forums. I don't suspect it is a very big deal, I thought I might try removing the Previous/Next and see if anything happens over time.

I'm sure there is nothing wrong with the ECT template, I am not suggesting that at all. I've been an ECT customer for 16+ years. I know these are top of the line, quality templates. I have given it a little over a month and it doesn't appear that my indexed pages are going to go back up. I am trying to figure out if the extraordinary drop was a result of something that I did (or didn't do) when switching sites/servers.

Perhaps I'll just give it another month. Fingers crossed.

Thanks again for the info!

quote:

---

All of my product detail pages are paginated i.e. - "Previous/Next"

---

The previous next link (on the product detail page) is not pagination at all.
It's not a link to page 2, page 3, etc... It's a link to another product with (what should be) unique content, unique page title, etc..
The pagination issue you describe might be as Marshall suggests, category or product pages that consist of multiple pages.
yourdomain.com/products.asp?cat=blue-widgets&page=1
yourdomain.com/products.asp?cat=blue-widgets&page=2

I have also found that those numbers seem to jump up and down, and dipped when we went full https as Peter suggests, but the major keywords that drive traffic to our site were still there driving traffic to our site, even during fluxuation of indexed pages.
I would suggest you take some time and ensure you have best practices applied and unique content.
Also go into your GWT account and be sure you have told Google what versions of your URL's to index and ignore.
For example, we tell Google to ignore the "partner" parameter. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en
There you can also specify that &page=1 and &page=2 should not be considered duplicate content and treated as a unique page.

Thanks dbdave! (I have a better understanding of pagination now)

When you say:
"There you can also specify that &page=1 and &page=2 should not be considered duplicate content and treated as a unique page."

In GWT > URL Parameters > would I specify this by creating a new parameter like this:

&page= and select "Yes, changes, reorders or narrows page content"

?

In my GWT account, I have the left column showing some URL parameters that it has found.
ECT uses "pg" for pages in the URL.
I have the following set for that

Does this parameter change page content seen by the user?
Yes:Changes, reorders, or narrows page content

How does this parameter affect page content?
Paginates

Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl?
Every URL

Most of them I have set to let googlebot decide, except cat,scri,prod,pg

Got it set. Thanks again for the help...

Make sure you are looking at the correct property in WMT, you should have four of them now, but it's the https://www...etc one you want to be looking at, the other three can fall to to zero, and they will although it might take years.

Peter

ServeLink
Professional ecommerce web hosting for ASP & PHP
https://servelink.com

Take a look at our image upload/resize tool for the ASP cart
https://servelink.com/clients/cart.php?gid=7

Peters absolutely right.
I have to create a new property for the all https version of my site.
But I think google may have prompted me to do that.

Thanks guys, I have the correct property (https://www)

Thank you dbdave for the URL Parameter suggestion!

I just wanted to post a little update here. After making the URL Parameter change as you suggested (below), my indexed pages via my Google Site Map have increased substantially. I am receiving visits to product pages that never received visits before the change. That seemed to help tremendously. Thank you very much for that tip. If you feel like sharing any further trade secrets, it would be very much appreciated

My pages and visitors have slowly increased and things are almost back to "normal". I purchased my original ECT template about 15 years or so ago. That content had been in Google for all of this time. I think the template change was a big upset for Google as there really hasn't been any major changes in about 15 years. I believe the extensive amount of time my site was in Google without any changes and then submitting the major design change may have played a big role in this issue. It seemed to be much like submitting a brand new website to Google as opposed to just submitting a design change. Nonetheless, things are starting to look much better.

I really appreciate everyones help. I honestly could not have done it without you guys.

Hi, I'm so glad to hear.
I can't imaging how difficult it was to see sales come to a screeching halt and I certainly would have been pulling my hair out.
I have to give credit for much of what I have learned over the years to the good folks on this forum. It's so much more than a support forum for me. There's lots of very smart people here, all willing to share powerful knowledge.
I certainly have gained more good info than I have shared, so I'll keep posting tips to try to settle that deficit.

That's great to hear, onward and upward

I also second what dbdave says
[quote]I have to give credit for much of what I have learned over the years to the good folks on this forum. It's so much more than a support forum for me. There's lots of very smart people here, all willing to share powerful knowledge.
I certainly have gained more good info than I have shared, so I'll keep posting tips to try to settle that deficit.[/quote]

Will - Bolton Manchester UK

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