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
-
Website(s) Merge Questions
Hello Moz Community I have three separate websites that I have planned on merging into one. I recently acquired a strong domain ( stronger than my existing ones ) & after much deliberation, I have decided to move them together into one domain. Site 1) 1 Forum - Around since 2007 - Originally VBulletin, last year migrated to discourse. Site 2) E-commercece Magento Site - Around since 2010 Site 3) WordPress - Blog & Articles - Around since last year - Currently using the new ( Main Domain I want to use ) After a lot of research and White Board Fridays, I was thinking this would be my best bet: newdomain.com - Merged WordPress & Magento CMS Page. newdomain.com/ forum <-- Will move my forum content & Install to the new domain. newdomain.com/ store <-- Will move my Ecommerce content & Install. Between my developer and I, we have our heads around how to handle the technical aspect of the move, 301s to the new location etc. But one area we want to research before pulling the trigger ( we haven't found much data on this ) **My Main Question:**What is the possible penalty coming for shopping websites vs. content-driven websites, and possibility that forum-based content hosted on the same domain might cause another penalty to be applied to the other content on the domain. **My Developer Says:**In recent years, we noticed that forum content had been penalized in favor of editorially reviewed content when this is identified by search engines.
Technical SEO | | Shop-Sq
What big hiccups would / could we encounter from combining these 3 types of platforms into one site?Many thanks for any direction or insight.0 -
2 domains for one website
Hi, I was wondering: i have 2 domains. One is the name of the company the other one is an exact match domain. There is only one website. If I use both domains for this website which one will rank? How google react to website configured like that? Regards
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
Website Cached Version
Hi all Why my full content is not appearing in Text only version(cached version): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zakoopi.com&es_sm=93&strip=1 Original website link: http://www.zakoopi.com/ How can I resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Redesiging website and how to prevent a SEO disaster?
Hey guys, I'm in the process of re designing my company website. This website runs in Kentico CMS and now I'm moving to drupal CMS. The main reason for the move is that I need a more flexible design with responsiveness and integrate better social aspects. Currently I'm having to deal with a developer whom can't be bothered to update the site. I also find kentico extremely difficult to deal with. The site has good Google rankings and I was thinking about setting up some 301 redirects when the move is completed. Now the question is this site is been live for over 2 years and I have tons of blog posts sitting in here. How can I get these moved? When this is done will they lose their 'age' ? What if I re create the blog posts as it is and then setup 301 re-directs on this? I have G+ authorship and will they be affected by this? Last question is having a responsive site will affect my SEO rankings once moved? I heard the 301 is not considered as a 'safe' thing with Google so what are my options? If anyone can share a link(s) to site upgrades/moving to new design tutorials/best practices articles based on SEO ill be grateful. Thank you very much.
Technical SEO | | Suganthan0 -
How to Remove a website from your Bing Webmaster Tools account
I have a site in Bing Webmaster Tools that I no longer work on. I can't seem to find where to delete this website from my webmaster tools account. Anyone know how (there doesn't seem to be anything obvious under Bing Help or on a Google Search).
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Websites that scroll....forever....
I'm seeing more and more websites that have all their content on one page. I came across www.otbthink.com today and am wondering if I'm missing something here. I ask this because I am trying to figure out how to link to their copy writing portion of their website. I have a client that is in their area and needs someone to do some copy writing work for them. All the content there is being served through css. The search engines will see it but how do you optimize for this sort of site? How do you link to a particular section of this site? Am I missing something obvious here? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Clarification from old seomoz post
I would need clarification from an old seomoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/q/rankings-changing-based-on-location-within-a-country-normal Particulary the following part - If you type in "Clear browser cache", Google KNOWS what browser you are using and can add the "Firefox" term in on your behalf, without it being apparent to the user What does it mean ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Old proudct pages - eComm Site
Hello, Geeks.com currently has approx. 194k pages in Google index. (approx. 30k suppl.) http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ageeks.com+inurl%3Aadditem&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Ltp&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&source=hp&q=site:www.geeks.com%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=876898a2ea0c82c7&biw=1512&bih=641 We have many thousands of old product urls which have gone out of stock, never to "see the light of day" again. 14 years worth! Should we be 301'ing all old products pages that go out of stock, if we know for certain we will never carry that SKU again? If we were to do a "mass" 301 of 30k+ urls how would google or other SE's react to that? Could there be any negative implications to doing so? What is considered best practice for eComm sites, as I imagine we are not alone with this type of situation. Thank you in advance. Michael B.
Technical SEO | | JustinGeeks0