Seo Loss When Dropping Wire Service's

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jordan

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Dec 12, 2013
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Question, I know there are a lot of anti wire-service people here, wanting to know if dropping the wire services affected your SEO when moving from a wire service hosted website.

We have a custom T.F. hosted site, we come up first in Google searches, and since they have put in efforts to increase our SEO so they can profit off our web sales, I would like to know if dropping them has negatively affected their SEO and/or web sales?
 
That's a great question, and one that everyone needs to consider when moving from one website platform to another.

There are a few factors:
  1. How good the current site is
  2. How good the new platform is
  3. How the transition is handled
Since 70% or so of your SEO ranking comes from off-site factors, it can be tempting to overlook the importance of transitioning well. (see below)

If the old site is junk for SEO, then moving to another platform should help.

If the new site is junk for SEO (flash, frames, etc) then not much will help you.

In your case the TF sites are now approaching OK for SEO, so you want to make sure that you don't lose what's been established so far. The biggest part of this will be implementing 301 redirects properly and quickly.

A 301 redirect is a server message that tells the web browser and the search engine that the page that formerly lived at this address has permanently moved to that address. It's like those telephone company messages that say "The number you have dialed has been permanently changed to..."
Click to expand...

You don't need to know how to do 301 redirects, you just need to know that they are being done for every page on the old site. As much as possible redirect to like pages (Christmas -> Christmas, About -> About, etc), not just to the new home page.

Two benefits of a 301 redirect:
  1. Tells the search engine to attribute all links, authority and social credit from the old page to the new one
  2. Seamlessly moves customers to the correct page if they followed a link or bookmark to the old page
You really want to have search engines find the 301s before they find the new pages, otherwise they will treat the new pages as new - no authority, no track record, etc.
 
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clearly they are doing everything they can for themselves but if they can siphon money off orders from our web customers it's in their interest to put time into member sites as well.

We've been wire forever like 60+ years, im third generation, my dad is old school always been wire service, where I see how much we do for breaking even if we are lucky. Our TF site does well, 75k a year AVG order is over $100. It's been doing awesome and would hate to screw up a good thing by dropping T.F.
 
Jordan, for us it went up. We dropped Fee'd to Death and few years back we're fearful of that. Our orders went way up from (10) at MD to over (70) the first year. Still scratching head, but didn't hurt us.
 
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We switched to our own site from TF in 2008, and although our google placement did not change (we always show up 1st or 2nd) we did have a decline in number of orders by about 20%. It took about a year to get back up number wise to where were, but in the mean time we hung on to about $350.00 per month in per order fees that help.

My advise would be to make sure your new site is very well developed and ready to launch.
 
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Another thing to consider is planning changes to your product mix with the launch of a new site.

Sometimes it's best to keep the product selection the same or similar for a time so that customers aren't hit with a change in site and in product pricing at the same time. This lets you gauge the effect of the new site first, then gradually update the products and pricing.
 
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When I went from FTD to strider a few years ago I did not suffer in SEO and orders. My other two web moves. Strider to Epic and Epic to Gravity Free had no loss of SEO. Each site has done better then the last for me. The site provider can only do so much. The sites can provide the tools but it's up to the users to take advantage of them It takes a lot of time and effort to keep a site updated.
 
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SEO IMPROVED moving from an WS-hosted site to an indy site. Why? You don't have thousands of other sites with similar content on the same server. Most important to keep your root URL.

DO look to see if any current pages have traffic via large quantities of inbound links (Pinterest? Facebook? Blog citations?) and have the webmaster redirect via 301 Redirects to the new pages since the naming conventions will likely change. Otherwise, a simple hosting change should be easy.
 
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