Recovering from a site migration
-
Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted.
To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?
-
Hi. Thanks for your comments. The migration happened six months ago, and there's no sign of recovery. I've seen quite a few big migrations tank due to mass redirects, and every one I've worked on that kept URLs largely the same has been fine.
Our crawl errors are now pretty low, and we keep working through any that come up. It's frustrating work!
-
I wouldn't think that's your problem or your answer. If you've been working on it for months and recently did the migration, it can take some time for the redirects to take effect. Are you verifying that new URLs are being indexed? If they are, are they receiving the same traffic as the old ones? If not, what's different about the content on those pages? Did you drastically change your navigation or your content? If you made sure that, at least, you redirected old pages that were getting search traffic and had exterior links to them, things should pick up again.
If you made the redesign as an organic SEO effort for a site that didn't already have enough authority to bring in the search traffic that you want, the redesign probably isn't going to help. If you redesigned a site or URLs that didn't get crawled often, the redesign isn't likely to help them get crawled more often. You have to make sure that your new URLs are indexed and then compare their search traffic to the old URLs in order to determine if there is a problem.
-
Sorry to hear you're having trouble after your migration, it's all too common to see this happen when sites are migrated or new sites go live.
The most important thing is to make sure all old pages have been 301 redirected to the relevant new page / if no relevant page to the homepage.
The drop in rankings could be due to backlinks pointing at pages which now 404 - if you haven't already use a backlink explorer such as Open Site or Majestic SEO and make sure none of your incoming backlinks are 404's, if they are get them redirected asap.
Has the site moved to a new domain or is it just a relaunch?
Also have a look at this article on site migration - http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
Danny
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
-
Seo for my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
There is no change of address pending for your site
Hi everyone. Google has recently started using our old .net instead of .com in the SERPS. I went to do a change of address for the old http://www.sqlsentry.net and it gives me the "There is no change of address pending for your site." I've tried for both www and non-www and still get the same result. All pages seem to be redirecting to the new site with no issues. Is there anything else I can do to change this? Or is there a step I'm missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
Potential problems with my site
Dear Mozzers I hope you can help me with the following problems: My site is up and running for a year now and may be there has been problem with the homepage, because it ranks on first page for a competitive keyword on Google.com and Google.com.au only, however in other countries it just shows up as internal page and does not rank well. google.com/Google.com.au: homepage ranks top 10 (example.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
Other countries (.co.uk, .ca..ect) an internal page shows up, example.com/internalpage.html - shows on page 3-4. I can not find the homepage of example.com anywhere around top 1000. Can you please tell me what are the potential problems. Thank you very much. BR/Tran0 -
Why is my blog out-ranking my main site?
Please see attached ranking history chart. On June 5th the chart shows that my main site is not coming up under our main keyword "door hangers" From then on, our blog took over. Any ideas why? Thanks Andrea lpEBciu.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
My site still out of rank
Hello, I am working on a site for past 3 months, here are the problems with this site, 1. It had a forum full of spam becuase initially captcha was not included, 10000 spam backlinks 2. Affiliate page was also hit by spam about 4000 spam backlinks which were either not existing or porn etc.... 3. Too many internal links which were indexed, these additional links were generated due to tags, ids, filters etc. Existing SEO team decided to remove the forum and after 30 days they blocked it in robots. But within 30 days the site moved from 3rd page to no where. Now after few days lator internal links are also cleaned by putting following in the robots, Dissallow: / *? Dissallow: / *id Dissallow: / *tag Links are now cleaning up, all the spam and bad links are now put into disavow file and sent to google via disavow tool. On daily bases good quality links are been produced such as through content, article submission, profile linking, Bookmarks etc. The site is still not any where on top 50 results. The impressions are decreasing, traffic also do not rise as much. How do you see all this situation. What do you suggest and how long do you think it will take to return to top 10 when good linking is being done and all preventive measures are being taken. I would appreciate any feedback on it. Thank you. Site URL: http://www.creativethemes.net keywords: magento themes, magento templates
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
How to get site into Yahoo News?
Can anyone provide some guidance on both how to submit your site to Yahoo News as well as some tips for how to get accepted into Yahoo News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0