I changed the domain and structure of my site,is there anything I can do to help speed the recovery in SERPs?
-
I change the domain of my site in March (pretty much exactly when Panda hit, by coincidence). Our search traffic has dropped by 90% in that time with little recovery. In webmaster tools it shows about 400,000 pages on the new domain and about 85,000 still indexed on the old domain.
I set up custom 301 redirects to all of the new pages on the new domain so everything that was moved has a good one hop redirect.
I've been told that the only thing I can do is sit back and wait for everything to finish transitioning. The problem is that it has been 5 months of poor traffic, which means 5 months of slow sales.
Is there anything I can do the speed up the transition?
-
I created a script and database that I use a regex lookup for the product id from old URIs and it will give me the new URI for that product, the script then sends a 301 with the new URL. There are about 11,000 entries in the database. Add to that the pages that don't have an exact match (such as extra product info pages and extra product review pages)...those are sent to the new product page since it is the closest match. That means I probably have 301s serving for 20,000+ pages.
-
How many pages did you 301 too if it was custom?
In my experience we recently worked with a site that had a few thousand pages recently as it was very smooth the rank tracking showed in a matter of weeks we were on a equal level.
You aim to 301 all the top most linked to pages as per GWT/OSE/Majestic.
Notify the changes in GWT.
It can take a few weeks for the process to kick in, especially if you have duplicative content issues on the new website can delay things even further.
-
Have you updated/submitted new xml sitemaps in webmaster tools?
-
Did you follow all of the steps in SEOmoz's Guide to Switching Domains? It's a great checklist that covers pretty much everything you should do to maximize your recovery speed.
BigDaylight also has a post about switching domains - most of the advice is reiterated in SEOmoz's guide, but it's got a bit more detail. Definitely worth the read.
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
-
Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell. Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said. Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty. To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Any help from the peanut gallery?
Technical SEO | | katandmouse0 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
Can You Use More Then One Google Local Rich Snippet on a single site/ on a single page.
I am currently working on a website for a business that has multiple office locations. As I am trying to target all four locations I was wondering if it is okay to have more then one Local Rich Snippet on a single page. (For example they list all four locations and addresses within their footer and I was wondering if I could make these local rich snippets). What about having more then one on a single website. For example if a company has multiple offices located in several different cities and have set up individual contact pages for these cities, can each page have it's own Local Rich Snippet? Will Google look at these multiple "local rich snippets" as spaming or will they recognize the multiple locations and count it towards their local seo?
Technical SEO | | webdesignbarrie1 -
We just recently moved site domains, and I tried to set up a new campaign for the new root domain, but it threw an error?
It threw an error saying we cannot access the SERPs of this site? Any reason why? It is an https:// site instead of the http://, but even our older domain had an https://
Technical SEO | | josh1230 -
Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?
I want to buy a domain that has clean backlinks and then redirect it to my new domain to bump up my PR. Is this considered a black hat technique? Thanks Carla
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson1 -
Can URL re writes fix the problem of critical content too deep in a sites structure?
Good morning from Wetherby UK 🙂 Ok imagine this scenario. You ask the developers to design a site where "offices to let" is on level two of a sites hierachy and so the URL would look like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let. But Yikes when it goes live it ends up like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk...s/residential/office-to-let Is a fix to this a URL re - write? Or is the only fix relocating the office to let content further up the site structure? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Has anyone used paid services to help improve their site
Hi, i am getting lots of spam in my mail box about how companies can help you get more traffic and i see on lots of sites about tools that can bring you more traffic and help improve your site, and i am just wondering if anyone has tried any of these services or products to help promote their site. For example, i keep getting sent about submitting my site to over 200 directories or search engines and just wondering if these are a waste of time.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670