A huge, interesting and complex e-commerce migration has resulted in a net-loss. The change, likely to be driven by high-level changes in the company, could have advantages in the long-term but Google will take time to re-assess the new content structure.
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Asda, a winner in our recent Retail Grocery analysis, is one of the top supermarkets in the UK and was the 62nd biggest domain by Google search visibility, its highest position in over 7 years. Today, a week after a migration from sub-domain to sub-directory, it is 12% down on visibility and has given up over 20 VI points to competitors.
This is a huge, complex and critical e-commerce operation and is probably the result of a change in IT systems. In these cases there’s often little chance to execute the perfect SEO migration.
The migration has removed the previous structure which included aisles, categories, dept, product and shelf architecture. The new structure is cleaner and includes more readable URLs. Over time, this may prove an advantage but, as of writing this, the migration process is complete and the net loss is clear to see.
Loss appears to be coming from the mismatch of new sub-category directories and old directories that were ranking well. It appears that some of these are now resulting in 404 which wont help Google.
The very successful URL (and parent directory) https://groceries.asda.com/shelf/home-entertainment/kitchen/ is now a 404, for example:
The category pages under that directory have been redirected and rankings might be recovered over time but it will take Google a while, months, to work through that. In the meantime the lost visibility will have gone to competitors.
Some category pages appear to have a 1:1 redirect and are continuing to work:
Data from the SISTRIX archive shows that there were 6605 URLs ranking under 9 top-level directories at groceries.asda.com before the migration.
Today, at www.asda.com/groceries/ there are 11989 URLs under 67 top-level directories which shows the scale of the new content structure.
This migration is interesting because it includes sub-domains and sub-directories, an architecture change and is a large brand in a competitive ecommerce market.
There’s an opportunity for this domain to grow over time as Google re-evaluates but for the next few months, Asda can expect less clicks from Google search.
The retail grocery sector is covered regularly in our SectorWatch and Visibility Leaders projects. View all the related information, data, trackers and analysis here.
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