ASOS now owns Topshop!
When I heard this news, I thought there’d be a massive migration project in the works.
But no! I went over to the Topshop site and was surprised to see a wildcard redirect in place.
This is a massively missed opportunity for ASOS.
A couple of years ago, ASOS were well known as a leading clothing retailer that were very aware of SEO.
I remember they used to rank well with their product description pages, and even their search pages.
If you had searched for ‘red dresses’ on Google, you’d get one of their search results pages.
Typed in ‘blue dresses’ and, again, you got one of their search results pages.
Was it a little spammy – perhaps!
But at the time, it worked for them!
They must have generated a ton of traffic with this approach.
Whether or not you agreed with the approach, you couldn’t deny that they were killing it with their SEO traffic.
And more importantly, they had an interest in SEO.
In my opinion, a lot of other clothing brands looked to ASOS’s SEO as their base to improve their SEO.
I say all this to say, ASOS, you missed a massive opportunity to retain some of the value of the Topshop site – and the other sites you purchased.
They all have a wildcard redirect in place!
What happened to redirect mapping, ASOS?
What happened to SEO best practices, ASOS?
What happened to evaluating SEO considerations, ASOS?
This is quite sad to see.
It seems like a knee-jerk reaction.
It seems almost like SEO was not even consulted. At all!
I can imagine someone from the board directly getting in touch with the Dev team to put in place what they have in place.
This is why you do not bypass SEO when SEO considerations are needed.
The Topshop domain had been built up for over 2 decades.
They had a domain authority of 86.
After 20 years you’re just going to let this go to waste, ASOS?
This doesn’t make any sense!
This was a high-value asset!
There seems to have been no strategic plan to preserve this asset.
It would be one thing if the business was no more – if the brand had ended its run. I’d understand this.
If the business had been dissolved, well, there wouldn’t be a need to preserve the brand.
That’s not what we have here.
ASOS bought Topshop.
Topshop, the brand still exists.
People still search for the brand.
They still want the brand in their lives – even if it is now owned by a different company.
Yet, just like that, people are no longer able to browse the website.
Where’s the consideration to these users?
Where’s the communication?
Where is the loyalty?
You really screwed this one up, ASOS.
Having a wildcard redirect is a lazy way of communicating.
It’s a terrible way of showing how much you value this asset.
And it is a great way to destroy its SEO!
According to Sistrix, Topshop has lost 80% of their search visibility.
I know SEOs are screaming ‘no-shit’ to this insight.
For non-SEOs who may not be aware as to why this visibility drop has come about, let me give you a quick breakdown.
If Topshop, with a domain authority of 86, had 1M HTML pages on the site, which were all indexed, and ranking on Google, have now all been redirected to the homepage of the site, what do you think Google does to all the pages that were ranking?
The pages, bar the homepage, quickly start to be un-ranked on Google.
If pages are un-ranked, what happens to the site’s visibility in the SERPs?
It shrinks. Quickly!
And guess what happens to the traffic the site would have received from these pages, which are no longer on Google?
It disappears.
Traffic disappear, not just from the organic channel, but from other channels as well.
The traffic the pages would have received has been thrown away.
This is a site that was operational just a month ago.
A site that was generating sales.
Gone. Just like that! Revenue has been thrown away.
This is bad, ASOS. This is really bad.
I would have thought you’d want to preserve as much of the value as possible.
Actually, you want to preserve the value.
If you didn’t you wouldn’t have bought the brand.
Topshop products are already on the ASOS site, which means you’re aiming to keep selling products from the brand.
So you do want to preserve the brand. You’ve just gone about doing so in a terrible way.
All you had to do, ASOS, was have redirect mappings in place!
That’s it!
A site like Topshop, it would have taken a month.
Actually, let’s be generous – let’s say 3 months of work – just for this site.
Are you telling me, you couldn’t account for this time, which would have saved you tens of thousands in revenue – at least?!
This is a major failing of SEO, ASOS. And yet, just another example of how important SEO is to a business.
A benefit of this mess, is that it can be used as a case study, on ASOS’s dime, of why just a little awareness of SEO goes a long way to save a company from losing revenue – both established, and future (cause, it’s going to take them a year, at least, to rebuild the value the pages had).