whats happened!

[heavenlygirl]

We decided to upgrade because we had a busy website and were getting orders every day and thought the time would be right, but since we have upgraded we are lucky if we get an order every 7 days, we do not know what has happened or where we are going wrong, and it is very frustrating. Our website looks and operates much better that before, but we no longer are getting the sales,it appears to be the worst move that we could have made, we thought it would improve our sales not kill them!

Any advice on our website would be most appreciated please as we are starting to lose heart.

Thanks

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

What version did you upgrade from?
Have you noticed a change in your google rankings?

[RuralWeb]

Loks like you have been hit by the old using ext info pages being indexed problem eg http://www.craftyaddicts.co.uk/acatalog/info_1151.html . Im assuming you have them set different to what you had in the previous version.

The vast majority of pages indexed by Google are now ext info pages and if people do land on them there is no where for them to go.

[heavenlygirl]

we upgraded from actinic express sales was good daily traffic circa 500 plus uniue visitors per day now we are lucky to have 50.
re google rankings we in our relavent catagories appear to have dropped a couple of pages -

[heavenlygirl]

ruralweb

we upgraded from express its naming convention was very differet - doyou have a suggestions what we can do to correct this situation

[RuralWeb]

upgraded from express

Thats the reason then - Catalog and express are very different and moving from one to the other will almost certainly have wiped out all you pages. In effect you are starting agin from scratch as far as google and the others are concerned. This is the big problem with express ie there is no clear upgrade path.

Your old express pages will still be lurking about and you may have a problem with duplicate content as well as the info pages problem.

[RuralWeb]

There has been some discussion about moving from express before but not many have done it as far as I know. It will require some detailed investigation to see what exactly has happened.

[Stereo Steve]

I'm involved in a move from Express to Business at the mo. Actinic have said they will put up a robots.txt file for the client on the express hosting which should allow redirects to direct google across.

If the express site is still up there and google has suddenly come across another site which is identical in text content, it will filter it. Unfortunately it may be a little late to do much about it.

I would make sure the express site has been removed completely and ask actinic if they will put a redirect on the URL to the new site.

[Stereo Steve]

You have 513 odd pages indexed by google and all but 12 are in the supplemental index at the moment, getting little or no traffic. This will probably be for duplicate content.

[heavenlygirl]

Stero Steve

Thanks ofr your information - how did you come acroos those figures from Google.
It is surprising that the sales chap from Actinic did not provide this information after all we was an long term express user.

Anyway thanks for your help and response - I will be onto support in the morning

regards

H

[Stereo Steve]

Google

site:www.craftyaddicts.co.uk/

This will give you a rough idea of the amount of pages that google has indexed.

Now google


site:www.craftyaddicts.co.uk/*

This will tell you how many pages google has in the main index. The rest are supplemental so they are logged but may not have been fully indexed. Please note this is a rough guide and not a perfect science but the returned stats fit in with your experience.

Actinic need to brush up on this and provide an upgrade re-direct service from express. It's not rocket science but can make a big difference. They ought to know this because there are plenty of people out there who don't have a clue what they are about to do to their google ranking.

Essentially you need a text file called robots.txt created and put into the root of the actinic express hosting which points all traffic to the new version of the page. Google will follow this and should rank the new page the same as the old. Only Actinic can put this file in of course as the user has not ftp access to the server.

What I would do in your shoes is to make absoultely sure that the old site no longer exists and has been deleted from the server. Then wait for google to come to the same conclusion. I have no idea how long this may take. Sorry.

You should have been better informed of the implications and the solution.

[heavenlygirl]

Stero steve

Thanks for your help its has really helped.
Despite cancelling the express site it is indeed still alive - apparently it will now go offline on 15.09.08. The second line tech support has stated that they will sort the robot.txt file as you suggest.

We do seem to have ongoing issue with proper advice from Actinic - but that is for another very popular thread elsewhere.

Thanks for the advice

Regards

H

[RuralWeb]

personally I would be tempered to go back to the express site if it's still live and get sales going again. Also remember customers will be trying to buy and you don't want to loose your customer base.

When sales are coming through again you can plan the move in slow time as at the moment you have a big problem that IMO a simple robots file will not fix. The pages you have listed are mostly ext info which should not be there.

[webgirl]

personally I would be tempered to go back to the express site if it's still live and get sales going again. Also remember customers will be trying to buy and you don't want to loose your customer base.

When sales are coming through again you can plan the move in slow time as at the moment you have a big problem that IMO a simple robots file will not fix. The pages you have listed are mostly ext info which should not be there.

I was reading this thread & thinking the same. Would it be an option to post the old site back up and then make some changes to the new site content & post the new site up on a different url.

That way you still have your existing sales, and can work on getting the new site placement and maybe optimise it on different keywords

Just a thought. I am not a techie though -what does everyone else think ?

katie

[heavenlygirl]

When sales are coming through again you can plan the move in slow time as at the moment you have a big problem that IMO a simple robots file will not fix. The pages you have listed are mostly ext info which should not be there.

Ruralweb - Thanks for the advice - when you say the pages are ext and should not be there - what is meant by this? I am very new to all of this and like webgirl I am not a techie

H