Problems with website on Dot Net Nuke

CompanyBureau

Hi everyone, I'm not from a technical background, but I would appeciate your opinions on this (in laymans terms if poss!!). We have a website on Dot Net Nuke (DNN) and we change the page URL's to make them more SEO friendly. However our web designer never did any 301 re-directs as he said they 'automatically re-direct' on Google. Anyway he did them after I queried it about 8 weeks later, but by then we had been obliterated on the organic listings by Google. He said this was down to Google's recent algorithm change, however an SEO guy told us it is because the 301 re-directs weren't done straight away. I don't know who to believe. No make matters worse, some of the old URL's are still in existance and being indexed by Yahoo, etc. so there seems to be 2-3 versions of each page

Could I get an experts opinion on the above and maybe a recommendation for someone who know's DNN or a possible solution?

Also should we migrate the site to joomla or wordpress instead or any other platform? It's a big site with around 50 pages. Any help really appreciated..

blue4ever

Ok, here is my €0.0254 worth on this.
Your CMS system is not one that I am wholly versed on, but that’s not the big issue.
The changes urls – would have (if the site is operating as it is now) gone to a 404 page like they are now. It would have been infinitely preferable if the url had been redirected from oldulr > newurl and this was seem less to the punter.
The misdirected url’s possibly didn’t help in the spidering process, but the wholesale tanking of the site would indicate that it’s not the whole and single reason – especially if its only a few of the 50 pages (that’s not excusing it). I’d have to park that one there as I haven’t enough outside information.
The ‘multiple version of the pages would be of concern – although you didn’t really explain that. Are there multiple pages on your site or on Google et al?
I don’t want to get you to wear your hear on your sleeve here so if you pm me some of the keywords and key phrases you are sinking on – I’ll have a look at that. Naturally some are fairly obvious given the industry!

I edit this because I put the brain in gear. It would alos be worth having a look at some of the pages that were redirected (the current ones). An external link to an 404 page would be fairly crappy and it would be worth looking at who./if anyone was linking to your site and to those pages.

CompanyBureau

Hi Blueforever, just about to PM you now. Cheers

mneylon

You should have setup a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new ones immediately. There's no way that Google can simply "discover" where content has moved to. It can, of course, index the new pages, but any links to the old ones will now end in 404s .. (unless you now have them properly setup to 301 redirect to the new ones .. )