Domain Change
-
What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain?
We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT.
This traffic drop seems excessive...
-
Hi David, yes, we moved from site.com to site.org.
We are running off WP and have the SEO plugin activated which has a rel=canonical feature. Pages on new site have canonical tags pointing to the new .org page. So no, we're not pointing back to the old .com pages.We fixed the duplicate content issue so just need to wait and see if that helps. It's been over a month and old site still showing up in index when I use directive site:mysite.com. I also submitted change site address in search console.
-
Yeah, having several thousand new pages on the new site would not be helping.
Just to clarify, you moved to a new domain and a completely new website at the same time?
The new URLs that have been created don't have a canonical tag pointing back to the original URL?
You should be able to setup a htaccess rewrite rule to sort this out quickly but I can't make any recommendations on exactly what to use because I don't know how your site is setup and how it all works (ie. if for some reason it needs index.php URLs with query strings in some areas).
-
Hi David, thanks for the feedback. It's been over 17 days so there probably is something going on with the site. As I mentioned in my reply above, we discovered that each article had been creating duplicate content (URL with parameters). I noticed several thousand more pages on the new site than the old site. Do you think this could be the root cause?
-
Hi Omar,
I recently went through a domain change on one of my own sites and saw similar decreases in traffic.
The site changed from http://www.oldsite.com to https://newsite.com
I know that my changeover was 100% flawless in terms of precautions and things that were implemented to prevent/minimize traffic loss, but I still saw a 50-70% decrease (this was also a Google News site - which had to be resubmitted after the domain change).
I posted a thread on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum to see if anyone else knew why there was such a decrease in traffic and was surprised to have a few people contact me privately saying they were/are going through the same thing.
My site took 17 days before seeing a sudden jump in traffic and it continued a steady growth over the following 4 weeks. 17 days was around the same time frame it took for the others to see their traffic pick up.
Provided you've done everything correctly with the site migration, my advice is "hang in there" (which I know is hard)! It shouldn't be long before you start to see things pick up again!
Cheers,
David
-
2 weeks ago. Just found out that each article was creating additional URLs with parameters appended to existing articles. Here's an example of additional URLs created:
site.com/original-article this article linked to:site.com/original-article/index.php?id=488923
This happened on every article on the site and we have thousands of articles.
I'm assuming we're getting dinged for all the extra URLs Google had to crawl? I saw a large spike in WMT post launch for pages crawled but that number has come down possibly because Google got tire of indexing all the bloat we had. Think that could be the problem? Articles on the site definitely aren't ranking as well so seems to be some type of algorithmic penalty.
-
We had a similar project few months ago, but from a .com to a .com
The website gain all possions over just few weeks, with an increase in rankings due to improvements to the on-page SEO.
maybe these blogs can help (both mention also updating your sitemap):
-
Hi Omar,
You really shouldn't see that much, but any drop should only be temporary. How long ago did you make the change? 50% does seem on the high side - I would expect a temporary drop of around 15% but have seen higher.
Did you update your sitemap as well?
-Andy
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 does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Choice of domain
Hi. I want to build a new site that is optimised for a training product that we have. We have an existing domain which I'm considering pointing at this new site. This domain is one of the new .training TLDs. Let's call this domain foo.training where my main keyword to optimise for will be "foo training". I've also looked and can see that foo-training.com is available. I read up on best practices for domains here : https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain My question is will the .training domain be seen as "spammy" in any way? Am I better to just go ahead and register the .com?
Technical SEO | | rmcatalyst0 -
Disavow to all domains?
Hi there, I have several versions of my domain setup in Webmaster tools. Should I upload my disavow file against all of these domains? For example.....
Technical SEO | | niallfred
If I find a link pointing to: http://www.mydomain.com from: http://www.somespammysite.com do I need to add a disavow file in Webmaster tools for all my domain versions or only the version the offending links points towards? So... Only
http://www.mydomain.com
Or
http://www.mydomain.com
http://mydomain.com
https://www.mydomain.com
https://mydomain.com0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
Changing Domain Registrars have an affect on rankings?
So, I just wanted to move my domain from GoDaddy to NameCheap. I am still thinking about the move as I am not sure what affect it will have on my rankings. Has anyone here done it before? Did you see any drop in rankings? Also, while I was at it - I was thinking maybe I can add WhoisGuard too. I am not too paranoid about people getting my info from WhoIs, but does having a private Whois have an affect on ranking?
Technical SEO | | uzair0