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
-
Can you help me figure out why my website is in conflict with guidelines of Google ?
Hi, Since few weeks now we received this message saying that our website is in conflict with the guidelines of Google's Webmaster. Here is the website for which we received the message from Google: http://www.gocustomized.es/. This url redirect to https://www.gocustomized.es/ I thought after reading your some messages from the forum that the problem was our website reviews which appear on all pages of the site. And I know that the review of the websites shouldn't be considered like the review of the product. But we remove the reviews and our request is still declined. Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | steph_ba0 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Webmaster Tools - How to Change Site Owner When Owner is MIA
I started working with a client about a year and a half ago. I had the computer guy who setup the website for my client grant me access to webmaster tools. When I added the site, I have "Restricted Access" I kind of dropped the ball in following up with him and now, there is no response from his email and the hosting provider website is down. Is there any way to get his non working email off as owner and make me the owner?
Technical SEO | | Czubmeister0 -
Need joomla help. site rankings dropped since upgrade
Hi, really having problems here with www.in2town.co.uk our site was always in the top ten for a large number of important keywords and since our upgrade from joomla 1.5 a month ago to joomla 3.0 we have vanished out of a lot of the search engines for important keywords I am concerned that we could be doing something wrong. two of our important keywords is lifestyle magazine and also gastric band hypnotherapy, but we are nowhere to be seen for these keywords. I must be doing something wrong. The site is an old site, we have been around for many years and have always ranked well up until now. We use K2 and i am just wondering if we have set up things wrong. for example under this article it comes under the category of trip advisor http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/t ... -term-stay now when you delete the article name and just keep the trip advisor you get a list of the articles and i am wondering if this is damaging my site. http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor any help in helping me to understand why my site has dropped in rankings would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What should I do with 10 Similar Domains pointing to one site?
Hello,
Technical SEO | | thealika
I was recently put in charge of one website with about 15 extra Domains. I previously asked if Domain Parking hurts your SEO as duplicate content - and i learned that the answer seems to be yes. My next logical question is:
What should I do with all those EMD, keyword friendly domains? As I understand, 301 redirecting the domains to the root domain is a safe bet, but that means the extra domains will point to the original root domain no mater what comes after the forward slash. So www.ExtraDomain.com/AboutUS will point to www.OriginalDomain.com - is there a way to keep the forward slashes relavent to the content on the original root domain, if so How? Your Advice, Links, and Comments are greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Nikita0 -
Is 301 redirecting all old URLS after a new site redesign to the root domain bad for SEO?
After a new site redesign ...would it hinder our rankings if we 301 redirected all old URLS that are returning 404 error codes to the root domain (home page) ? Would this be a good temporary solution until we are able to redirect the pages to the appropriate corresponding page? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
We have been keeping other sites on our domain while we build them for clients and not taking them off afterwards
So when I look in wmt its telling me our site is about fish oil etc when we are web designers. We have blocked these pages in robots text and removed them. WMT is showing 500 errors in crawl errors and telling us we have health issues on our site. what should we do and how do i bulk select these errors is wmt to mark as fixed (if they are fixed)
Technical SEO | | duncan2740 -
A client will be translating their entire site into French in addition to English. For SEO purposes, should I host it on the same domain or create its own dedicated domain?
The current site is a long-standing site with good authority and a good number of links. Thanks....
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0