Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
-
Howdy Mozzers
I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me!
***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing
Background
The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change.
Problem
Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline.
*They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get.
Redirects
During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up:
Original:
http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume
Canonical issue
On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013.
Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example).
Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda)
According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However -
Sitemap
We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap.
Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z
Change Frequency: Yearly
Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca
What we looked at so far
-
The redirects are all currently 301’s
-
GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch
-
We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be.
-
Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank.
-
We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials
-
We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1).
-
Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
-
-
Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them.
Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people!
Mark
-
About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B. Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo. Nothing. NOTHING. Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.
Rankings and traffic immediately tanked. I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time. I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.
Now it was #2. Crap! I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.
I didn't do anything. No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.
A few months later the rankings and traffic came back. My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month. When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc. Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back. Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.
-
It's very likely due to the domain switch but to give yourself something else to do to do besides what you've done so far (and if you haven't done this already) and give yourself some direction to take while you're waiting for your rankings to come back up, go ahead and isolate how the drops in traffic are occurring:
- Research what keywords mapped to which of your old landing pages and which of those keywords are now bringing in less traffic.
- Did you completely fall out of the results for some of your keywords or have you just dropped somewhat in the rankings for all of your keywords?
- Are you now only ranking for brand terms?
- What specifically has changed with your traffic
At this time, you may do well by coming up with a strong content strategy and working the PR and G+ channels to get that content out to new and existing audience members--it can only help.
-
Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.
That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website." We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.
If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.
Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.
That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Different URL structure Desktop VS Mobile Regarding SEO when building a new seperate mobile site
Hi I have a old OScommerce webshop, that i will keep for now, but i have build a complete new mobile site for mobile devices, but it has another url structure. Can i launch this site without any problems when its Google Mobile Search Engine that index the mobile site, and then just make the neccesary rel alternate tags for the desktop site for the product pages and main categories that i can. There will be some differences in the urls i cant make a alternate for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | noerdar0 -
How to de-index old URLs after redesigning the website?
Thank you for reading. After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain). It would be nonsense to 301 redirect them as there are to many URLs. (or would it be nonsense?) What is the best way to deal with this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
New Domain VS New Page Backlink?
Assuming you've already got a link from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz
sitea.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) You have two choices for another link: 1. Another link on the same domain but a new page:
sitea.com/page2 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) 2. A link on a new domain but with a lesser domain & page rank
siteb.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 30, Moz page rank 20) Assuming you have no other links to your site - both sites are relevant to your industry, both 5 years old, both have the same number of visitors/external links/ads and the content and anchor text remains the same. Which will have a bigger impact on SERP movements? Sam0 -
Mixing static.htm urls and dynamic urls on a Windows IIS Server?
Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0