Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
-
Hello,
We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com.
We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks.
Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl.
Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain?
Thanks,
Eugene -
Here we go again. The problems with technicalities...
Ok, here it is - 301 does NOT lose any link equity passed through it. It's known and that's what the linked post and tweets are talking about.
What me and @effectdigital are talking about is "downtime" after 301-redirecting from one domain to another. The value of domain IS affected.
If you would redirect a page from your own domain to another, on your own domain, sure, there wouldn't be any loss in link equity, but there would be loss in page authority for the new page. Think about it like this - google ranks a page, because it "knows and trusts" it. All of the sudden, that page is not there, and just sends google to another page. Google needs time to make sure that it's the same page, about the same stuff, with the same quality. It never takes away the link equity, but the "trust factor" is not there for a bit. When it happens within the same domain, Google understands that it could be simple content move or URL change. When it's cross-domain, the reasons could be much different. From hacking to selling the website etc. So that's why the rankings and usually traffic goes down, but, after Google realizes that it's all the same, and all good, they recover.
Hope this helps, and sorry for the confusion earlier.
-
Thanks for your responses Dmitrii Kustov and effectdigital, to restate the quoted information, our uderstanding was that there would be a downdraft period of at least several weeks, maybe longer, but that we would eventually recuperate our page rank. I had referenced somewhat recent articles stating that 30x redirect no longer dilute pagerank, whereas in the past there could be 10-15% dilution.
https://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608
effectdigital, to answer your questions:
- Yes, the full site has moved to brandshop.com as of early last month
- The new site is somewhat of a re-build but 95% the same in terms of pages and content. To clarify, the contents within brand.com/shop and brandshop.com are nearly the same
- We have not shed a lot of content. Just a handful of products were disabled (in a catalog of thousands of products).
- No, we did not benchmark rankings or put any attention into SEO for that matter. I came on board pretty late into the project, and without making excuses, my time was prioritized in other aspects of the business. We did not do a "one-size fits all" redirect, we mapped out all old category to new category URLs and wrote redirect rules, page-to-page redirects in several instances where URLs had changed, and an analysis of top 500 pages to check for outliers.
- I wouldn't call this a hunch migration. From an SEO perspective, I solely focused on getting the redirects in place, and perhaps didn't put enough thought into whether or we should have moved to a new domain from an SEO perspective and whether the cons outweighed the other business decisions behind the move.
-
"the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank" - the prior response from Dmitrii Kustov hit the nail on the head here. This was terrible information. It's well known that although 301 redirects insulate the most possible equity, it's not a sure-fire thing and there usually is down-turn (sometimes significant). The information upon which you were acting was bad.
Redirects also decay over time, so if they have pumped much of the initial equity-bonus into dead, defunct pages which were never meant to exist, you won't get all of that back (even if you fix the redirects). 3-4 days in this probably won't hit you like a sledgehammer (if you fix things NOW this second) - but you will feel it a bit.
Considering that not all PageRank is transferred through 301 redirects, you probably won't recover to your former strength in terms of rankings on redirects alone. If you have made other positive movements (switching to HTTPS, faster page-loading speeds on the new site, better site design, promotional links work for the new domain) then you may recover quickly and even begin to exceed prior performance. If you have literally just changed domain and done nothing else, expect a bit of a rough ride.
If your old domain is no longer in use and is purely a platform for redirects now, it will begin to lose its authority. Google doesn't rank 'doorway' pages. Google doesn't like to rank URLs which then redirect somewhere else! As such, if you have killed your old domain off then you need to be making movements to boost the new domain's authority, so that when the old domain fully decays (and the 301s along with it), you're not left in a hole.
You say "We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority" - that's an incorrect statement. Domain authority is attached to a domain, not to a company. You **had **strong domain authority, it may now be decaying with some amount being transferred to your new site.
Where you write:
"is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain?" - there's a whole barrel of worms there. This implies that the old domain is carrying on in some form without your individual part of the business! As such, that domain authority will belong to 'them' and your new site will **only **receive a maximum of equity relating to the 'part' of the site that moved, not the site in its entirety. You won't perform the same as the main / parent site, if you're just a tiny extract. That's an unreasonable expectation! Authority divides it doesn't multiply
Depending on your situation the outcomes could vary wildly. If the old site is completely shut down and turned into a redirect farm, with the kinds of cited muck-ups I'd expect to maybe see 75-80% performance if everything is handled perfectly from ... well, from right now. If you're just an extract of the parent site and they're retaining the 'bulk' of their SEO ranking power, you can't expect to be on that same level. Otherwise SEOs would just recommend all clients to turn their sites into 10 sites and they would all rank equally well (that demonstrably does not work and is not the case)
The main Questions are, has the full site moved? What is the nature of the new site, is it a re-build or just a tiny extract being separated out? Has the site shed a lot of content? Did you benchmark which URLs held the most, and most lucrative rankings before moving - or did you just do a dev-based one-size fits all redirect catch based on logic (but not data)? Did you do a 'hunch' migration? If so, expect to feel the sting
-
Hi there.
First, "...the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank" - where did you get that info? 0.o It's well-known fact that there always be a downdraft with a period of recovery.
To answer your question - yes, you'll recover (assuming all 301s were done correctly). But it will take time. The problem is that your shop initially had the power and authority of your main domain (when it was brand.com/shop/blabla). Now, it's a brand new domain, with no history. And yes, even though you have redirects, it's still much closer to starting new domain, rather than redirecting domain completely.
Think of it as instead of building second story on top of existing house, you have to build brand new building with foundation and all, using some materials from your existing house. Who suffers? - both. You are taking away from existing place, and it will take longer and more resources to build up new place. Is it beneficial? - Sure, after both buildings are built - you'll have 2 great places to live in.
Hope this makes sense
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
-
What is your experience so far, with the new Google's Meta Description length up to 320 characters?
I updated a few home pages and some landing pages, so far so good! Although, I wish to know about other experiences, before continue updating. Thanks for your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mª Verónica B.2 -
Google's Knowledge Panel
Hi Moz Community. Has anyone noticed a pattern in the websites that Google pulls in to populate knowledge Panels? For example, for a lot of queries Google keeps pulling data from a specific source over and over again, and the data shown in the Knowledge Panel isn't on the target page. Is it possible that Google simply favors some sites over others and no matter what you do, you'll never make it into the Knowledge box? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Move to new domain with new design and url
I have an e-commerce website that is template based and I have absolutely no control over it. Each product have quite good ranking in google. However, we are creating new website using asp.net mvc and host in azure. It has totally new design. Since I have no control over my old website, I cannot force the server to redirect each product page to my new website product page. This is what I have done so far. I told my old website provider to point my domain (ex. domainA.com) to new nameserver at dyndns I created a new zone and add a http redirect service to new domain (http://www.domainB.com) with 301 redirect I'm pretty sure that this is not enough since there is a difference in url like this Old: www.domainA.com/product/70/my-product-name New: www.domainB.com/product/1/my-new-product-name New route config: {product}/{id}/{name} As you can see, the structure is similar but the product id and name is different. Do I need to catch the incoming id and name from old website and 301 redirect it again to the correct one? If so, this will cause double 301 redirect and would this be a SEO problem? Thank you in advance for your answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | as142208080 -
Brand traffic moved from organic to PPC - could it affect rankings?
Hi, We've just increased a lot of branded PPC clicks for one of our clients. I've worked out that roughly 5000 clicks per month has been moved from organic search to PPC (all brand related search queries). These clicks are very cheap, but the client has expressed worries about what these clicks could do to our organic rankings. Lots of brand search in organic results proves to Google that this is a strong brand, right? So what happens when all the searches are still there, but the organic listings stop getting the clicks? Could this have a ring effect on other non-brand rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title
Hello, I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together! 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name OR 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6thirty0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
Inspiration from today's WBF!
Hello and Welcome MozFriends! so I watched the WBF this morning, and I got the idea of making Keyword Tiers for a site like so. Site Products- wheelchair, Powerchairs, Hospital Beds, Lifts, Lift Chairs Specific Items- 16" wheelchairs, 4 wheel power chair, Patient lifts and such. The Keywords for the Front page would be very general not referencing the sites specific items at all. Like Medical Equipment, supplies things like that. Keywords for products would be the Manufacturers names, and the category name. Specific Items would have specific keywords to draw an audience that has a goal and is searching for that specific product. So my theory/experiment is this. Instead of making the whole site generate traffic for one type of audience, I am making certain tiers for certain audiences. The higher up in the Site Hierarchy the more global the keywords are designed for. It may just be complete and utter non sense but I would like to hear any thoughts on it if it works. Thank You Friends! Justin Smith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0