Recovering from a Redesign?
-
We recently redesigned a client's website, updated SEO (page titles, descriptions, internal linking), and have experienced a massive drop both in organic and direct search traffic.
We had an issue with the sitemap that I resolved last week, but traffic doesn't show any signs of recovering. What should I expect and what can I do to get back to where we were?
The site is www.rugcare.com, if anyone wants to take a look.
-
I'm getting something a little different out of this. I plugged rugcare.com into SEM Rush. It shows a considerable spike in traffic in June, then a very big drop in July. Joehadeed.com and bergmanns.com are showing relative spikes and drops as well. So there's a possibility that a bigger competitor is eating everyone's share.
Though when I plug rugcare.com into Majestic SEO, it shows 55K redirect links pointing to rugcare.com. Majestic picked this up in late June, which may account for the sudden spike in rankings and traffic, followed by a steep decline in July. It also appears that the site received a number of links from housecleaningadvice.com with the anchor text 'upholstery cleaning tips - rug care'. They appeared to be nofollow, and I can't find the links anymore, but I wouldn't take a link from that site at all. It looks like it's part of a typical blog spam network.
I don't want to scare you, but have you received any warnings in GWT?
I also can't find these three pages on the current site via nav or crawl:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131230215654/http://www.rugcare.com/carpet-cleaning
https://web.archive.org/web/20131014021917/http://www.rugcare.com/oriental-rug-cleaning
https://web.archive.org/web/20131014021812/http://www.rugcare.com/carpet-and-rug-repairs
Was there any particular reason for their omission? Do you know how much traffic those pages used to receive? It looks like the oriental rug cleaning page would have accounted for a chunk of traffic on it's own. Now it just 404s.
-
I have migrated many sites, and typically I see a small, but noticeable fluctuation in kw positions even when little was changed. You mentioned massive. Can you elaborate? Were these long-tails or competitive terms? What positions, before and after?
-
I wrote this before you posted you're response, so I will have to think more
Good Morning!
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is very hard for things to change online and have little to no effect be felt either positive or negative.
To expand on what Kevin is asking above it is incredibly difficult to examine what is causing drop in traffic without knowing what came before. For example, if you changed ANY of the URL's and didn't properly put in 301's that is a very quick way to get some of your traffic back. I ran your website through Screaming Frog, which is a spider of sorts and it found one 301. Without telling Google where an old URL lives you are loosing any SEO that the old URL had.
Another thing to consider is the content. If the previous website was a literal rug encyclopedia on repairs and was the go-to website for "oriental rug repairs", and the content was now shifted more toward "oriental rug cleaning" you may see a drop in traffic as Google feels that you have less authority with the new content, and have lost authority in the old.
Hope this helps guide a little.
Another good resource below.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/
-
No change to the URL. I believe the homepage content was updated, but most of the internal pages remained the same.
I did unique page titles and descriptions and added some internal links. I was planning to do more there, but I don't think that's the cause of our issues here.
The client brought over all the content from their old blog so that wasn't lost.
-
Did anything else change besides what was stated above (such as url, headings, content & etc.)?
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
-
How recovering the ranking after an hacking
Hello, I'm Alexia and a few months ago (end of March) my site has been hacked: hackers have created more than 30.000 links in Japanese to sell tires. I've successfully removed the hack and after 14 days of struggle even decided to change the domain to Siteground as they've been really keen to help. I still have some problems and I desperately need your tips. In search console, Google is informing about the +30.000 404 errors due to the content created by hackers which is not available anymore. I've been advised to redirect those links to 410 as they might have penalty effects in the SERP I have 50 503 server errors recognised by Google back in April but still there. What should I do to solve them? I still have a lot of traffic from Japan, even if I've removed all the content and ask Googled to disavow spamming backlinks. Do you think I have on page keywords? I don't understand how they can still find me. Those KWs are indexed in analytics, but not effective clicks, as the content is not there anymore. I also asked Google to remove links in search console with the tool removing links but not all of my requests have been accepted. My site disappeared from the organic results even if it hasn't been recognised as hacked in Google (there wasn't any manual actions on the Search Console). What can I do to gain the organic positioning once again? I've just tried to use the “Fetch as Google” option on search console for the entire website. Thank you all and I look forward to your replies. Thanks! Alessia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlessiaCamera0 -
Completely redesigned webmaster - set up new site in Google Webmaster Tools, or keep existing??
Hi - our company just completely redesigned our website and went from a static HTML site to a PHP based site, so every single URL has changed (around 1500 pages). I put the same verification code into the new site and re-verified but now Google is listing tons and tons of 404's. Some of them are really old pages that haven't existing in a long time, it would literally be impossible to create all the redirects for the 404s it's pulling. Question - when completely changing a site like this, should I have created a whole new Search Console? Or did I do the right thing by using the existing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Website redesign, some urls are no longer available. How do I mitigate ranking drops?
I am currently refreshing my WordPress business website. I used a theme that had a built in portfolio option. I wanted to strip down the bloat and move to something more simple to better articulate my message. Upon switching themes I will loose my urls for my portfolio projects. I should have never used this built in function but it did exactly what I needed and wanted here is an example. http://silvernailwebdesign.com/portfolio-view/central-jersey-claims-association-wordpress-consulting/ Now on my staging site these portfolio pieces have vanished and the urls are indexed with google. I could create posts and recreate the portfolio pieces however the problem with the url is the /portfolio-view/ portion. I cannot recreate the part of the url. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I receive some traffic through the portfolio pages but not much, however, I do not want to loose any traffic. I am looking for a strategy that will solve this url issue with WordPress. I have about 10 separate portfolio pages with this url issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.
Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeyondIndigo1 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Recover rankings after having a website temporally unavailable
Hello i have this website www.productosalpormayor.com and because i forgot to renew the domain it was 15 days unavailable ... it was ranking pretty well i had 4000 a month from google , but right now i have 0 ... the keywords that used to be on the first places are very far away or dont rank anymore... Is there something i can do now.?.. I need this website back to ranking because i am about to launch new products on the website. Thanks a lot, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conexion330 -
Recovering from index problem (Take two)
Hi all. This is my second pass at the problem. Thank you for your responses before, I think I'm narrowing it down! Below is my original message. Afterwards, I've added some update info. For a while, we've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/. Everything was going swimmingly, and we had a top 5 ranking for the term 'bird hides' for this page - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides. Then disaster struck! The client added a link with a faulty parameter in the Joomla back end that caused a bunch of duplicate content issues. Before this happened, all the site's 19 pages were indexed. Now it's just a handful, including the faulty URL (thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/index.php?id=13) This shows the issue pretty clearly. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&oq=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2178j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 I've removed the link, redirected the bad URL, updated the site map and got some new links pointing at the site to resolve the problem. Yet almost two month later, the bad URL is still showing in the SERPs and the indexing problem is still there. UPDATE OK, since then I've blocked the faulty parameter in the robots.txt file. Now that page has disappeared, but the right one - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides - has not been indexed. It's been like this for several week. Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Hot to move 3 websites into 1 SEO wise and recover from penaltys in the process?
I decided to migrate 3 EMDs and all of its content into 1 big new website. 1.) I will manually move each page/post to the new website, on new hosting. 2.) Redirect each old url to new via htaccess (how long do I have to wait before I simply change DNS records on my old domains, and just point it to the new domain - want to drop one hosting plan in the process) 3.) Tell Google via Webmaster tools, that my site has moved to the new domain. Website A suffered from Penguin update, Website B suffered from EMD update and Website C is OK. I removed most of "bad" and "exect anchor text" links from websites. Could I just move the content, change DNS records and tell Google that my website moved. Any thoughts, advices and pointers are appreciated. Tnx Marko Strbac
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkoStrbac-SlovenianSEO0