Tale of Woe

by 7 replies
8
My site is 6 years old and content driven. I got PR4 on the homepage and lots of PR1-3 on inside pages and tonnes of traffic and a nice adsense income.

I was running joomla 1.5 and got hacked, plus the plugin I was using for selling digital downloads was no longer supported, so the time came and I had to upgrade to j 2.5. I researched for a long time, and watched a matt cutts video clearly saying that 301 redirects would pass link juice and would not negatively affect seo. Bearing in mind that j2.5 uses a different structure of categories than 1.5, my urls were going to be different. I redirected everything, so that the 301s would pass the link juice.

Result - lost 75% of my traffic and revenue. That was first week of October and it's not looking like it's going to come back in a hurry.

Since upgrading, I read somewhere that 301s will no longer pass link juice. Can it be true? I am still holding out a bit of hope that I'll get my old traffic back but is this wishful thinking?
#search engine optimization #tale #woe
  • Banned
    Firstly, yes it is true that 301s will no longer pass link juice. and the second thing about the traffic what you can do is send your website to google webmaster for review. And have a look on it status and let me know what it states ?
  • Do you mean under Security Issues? "We haven't detected any" etc. The hacking was a year-ish ago and the site was reviewed after clean up & passed.
  • Banned
    Sounds like you've changed the entire site structure so links will be added/removed from the original ranked pages. 301 redirecting every single link on a site would be a nightmare.

    I don't use Joomla but it doesn't sound right that upgrading core files would require a site template/theme (internal links) to be changed.
    • [1] reply
    • Joomla 1.5 had a structure where you had only 2 levels in the hierarchy. Joomla 2.5 allows for any number. My site logically worked better with more levels so I thought I would take advantage of that, since according to Mr Cutts the 301s WOULD pass juice. Not only that but the articles I had to import into the new joomla got given different ID's which resulted in different URLs even if I hadn't wanted to use the different hierarchy. I ummed and arred about this for ages and read people's stories about doing it, using 301 and getting the link juice. Little did I know that Google was gonna move the goalposts! Hindsight is a wonderful thing

      Also template-wise, I had to use a new template as the old one was no longer supported. I don't think this affected the URLS but might have affected my SEO somehow I guess.

      So, I am deep in the doodoo. What do I do to get out?
  • Here's a chart for your amusement ;-)
    Uniques in the last 12 months. Pass me the gun.
    Attachment 19267
  • Goodnight man 1.5? No wonder you got hacked. joomla is at 3.4 and Joomla 1.5 was released five years ago. That a long long time for CMS software
  • yeah I know
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    Tale of Woe

    My site is 6 years old and content driven. I got PR4 on the homepage and lots of PR1-3 on inside pages and tonnes of traffic and a nice adsense income. I was running joomla 1.5 and got hacked, plus the plugin I was using for selling digital downloads was no longer supported, so the time came and I had to upgrade to j 2.5. I researched for a long time, and watched a matt cutts video clearly saying that 301 redirects would pass link juice and would not negatively affect seo. Bearing in mind that j2.5 uses a different structure of categories than 1.5, my urls were going to be different. I redirected everything, so that the 301s would pass the link juice.