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Earlier this year I rebuilt my website using ZenCart. Immediately I saw a drop in index status from 59 to 0. I then signed up for Google Webmaster Tools and noticed the Index status took a dramatic drop and has never recovered. I have worked to add content and I know I am not done, but have not seen any recovery of this index since.

What confuses me is when I look at the sitemap status under Optimization it shows me there are 1239 submitted and 1127 pages indexed.

Most of my pages have fallen off page one for relevant search terms and some are as far back as page 7 or 8 where they used to be on the first page. I have made some changes in the past week to robots.txt and sitemap.xml, but have not seen any improvements. Can anyone tell me what might be going on here? My website is andersonpens.net.

Thanks! Brian

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closed as too localized by John Conde♦ Nov 15 '12 at 16:28

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

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Most likely your URL structure has changed from your old shopping cart to ZenCart. Do you know what your previous product URL's looked like? And do they match up 100% with how ZenCart generates them?

Google may not index all the pages you've submitted for various reasons.

You should have ran Xenu link sleuth against your old domain. From the CSV report create 301 redirects to the new URL's saving some of the link juice.

According to archive.org your old category page for pens was called http://andersonpens.net/pens-for-sale

It's now called http://andersonpens.net/pens

Your main header navigation links to http://andersonpens.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=152 which is redirecting to /pens

So my thoughts are that all your URL's have changed. That's caused the drop in the search engines since the content and link structure of your site has changed. You've done everything correct by submitting a sitemap to Google. Though creating redirects would have helped prevent some of the loss but probably not all of it.

If you still have your old website backed up I would install it on a temporary server run Xenu link sleuth and get a CSV of all your links. Then create 301 redirects in excel, export to text and copy/paste to your htaccess file to save what you can. Also check that your title tags remain the same.

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