We had to install Joomla CMS in a subdirectory and the way the site is working at the moment is that when you hit the original home page, you get redirected to the new CMS home page. This is a .htaccess URL rewrite, with a R=301 flag. index.php (old home page) now sends you to /cms (new home page). Once you are at /cms all the main links keep you within the /cms directory so, for example, the order page links will go to /cms/order. However, the old site pages are still running in parallel with the new CMS ones, so if you go to /order without the prefix you will get taken to the old order form. This is the same for many other pages. Some pages don't have a new equivalent in the CMS system so to reach them you are still sent to the original site pages.
The CMS has a different header/footer from the old site pages. Are there any obvious changes that would have affected our page ranking?
Old site page: site.tld/services
New site page: site.tld/cms/services
As you can see the new page doesn't have a set of SEO-sepcific links at the top right corner. The new page also doesn't have meta description and keywords. Could these things have affected our page ranking drastically?
If you Google "oxbridge essays", the site used to rank top and have a set of sub links provided by Google. Now we have one link at #2 to our old page /order, which seems to show that all the new CMS pages don't actually rank at all.
Does anybody have any insight into this?
Thanks in advance.
Edited by chrishirst, 30 July 2012 - 04:39 PM.
