Should we reinstate the old website?
-
In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well.
A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?
-
The true answer to reinstating the old site depends upon the quality of work done on the many parts of the job by the PR agency. If this was my site, and it was performing kickass before these PR guys got their hands on it, I would toss the old version back up and do a deeper assessment - because the results thus far suggest that the PR agency doesn't know much about SEO.
<kibitz>In the past few years a lot of PR agencies have become spammers who wear suits to work.</kibitz>
-
If the refresh was just because the site looked dated, why was all the content updated?
A complete rebuild of the site seems a little drastic if it only needed a facelift. Were there other concerns?
As Kevin asked, were 301s set up? if there were no 301's set up, any previous links will no longer be passing juice, which could have a serious impact.
-
Were 301 redirects put in place? If so, was the content, more or less, the same? Was there specific pages that dropped in traffic and others stayed the same? Did you see anything in Search Console?
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
-
Setting Up A Website For Redirects
I've got an old defunct domain with a lot of backlinks to individual pages. I'd like to use these backlinks for link juice by redirecting them to individual pages on the new domain (both sites belong to the same company). What is the best way to set this up? I presume I need some kind of hosting & site, even if it's just a default Wordpress install, which I can then use to set up the redirects? Would it be best done using .htaccess file for 301 redirects or some other way?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Mobile website indexing
Hi we have a mobile version of our website at mobile.gardening-services-edinburgh.com its been live for 5, maybe 6 months, it has its own mobile-sitemap.xml have tried submitting this sitemap to google and for some reason it does not index these pages any ideas, most welcome
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
Duplicate Version of My Website
Hello Again, Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here. Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before. www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with. Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Do the terms in a website url drive search hits
I've tried to do a search on a few key words that I knew was on my landing page and I couldn't get Google to find it. So I thought maybe I needed to change my url to reflect a few the terms.
Technical SEO | | Toal0 -
Website Hierarchy Question / Discussion
Hey all, I am looking to get the opinions off the community to help settle a discussion / debate. We are looking at how a site is laid out and which is the preferred method. There are two options: www.site.com --> /category-page --> /product-page (With this option, you always have the domain name and then page, no matter where in the site you actually are, and how many clicks it took you to get there). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/product-page www.site.com --> /category-page --> /category-page/product-page --> (With this option, you into a defined structure). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/category-page/product-page If you have a moment, I would be interested to know your views on which you would consider to be your preferred method and why. Thanks, Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
New Website, New URL, New Content - What do we do with the old site? Are 301's the only option?
We've just built a new site for a client. They were adamant on changing the url. The new site is entirely new content, however the subject mater is the same. Some pages are even titled very similarly. Is is advisable to keep the old site running, and link it to the new site? Permanently, or temporarily? Do we simply place redirects from the old site the new? Old site was 30 pages, new site is 80 pages. So redirects won't be available to all the new pages. It seems a shame to trash the old site, it is getting some good traffic, and the content - although outdated is unique and of a high quality. Old url is 4+ yrs old, the new url is new. Some enlightened opinions would be greatly welcomed. Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarketsOnline0 -
Optimizing Flash websites
Does anyone know the latest on how well Google is indexing flash sites? I'm talking to a prospect now whose site is 100% flash, but looking at it all the content within the site is indexed and returning in the results. This is promising enough, but does anyone know exactly how well Google is indexing flash content these days and are there still any problems with that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
Technical SEO | | SEOed0