Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
-
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic.
I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
-
I was able to redirect all the links to the new site, so we shouldn't have lost anything that way. However, I did ask the webmasters/managers of many pages who were linking to us if they could please change the url they were linking to, to the new one.
-
Oh ok, I'm not sure what you mean by " ... wasn't able to get all of our old links changed over to our new URL, but I've requested changes from the "best" ones ..." then.
If there are old indexed pages that are giving 404 errors won't that affect the transfer of "link juice" to the new domain?
-
As far as I can tell, everything has been redirected to the new url.
-
What happens for old links that you weren't able to redirect to the new URL?
-
Thanks, Chris! We've done everything in the Webmaster Tools guide, and while we had an issue with redirects, that has now been resolved for at least two weeks.
I wasn't able to get all of our old links changed over to our new URL, but I've requested changes from the "best" ones and everything that is linked to the old site should redirect to the new without issue.
It's just anxiety-inducing to go through all this and see such devastating results!
-
Jess,
There are a number of processes that need to take place in your move and the time frame you mention allows for all of them to take place and still not see results yet. Perhaps you could list the steps you've taken so far so we can see if you might have missed anything. If not, here are a couple of resources for you review what needs to be done.
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
-
Mergers & Acquisitions - Website Transition Good practice
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone has come across good practice for maintaining websites after a merger or acquisition where there needs to be an association between two websites of the two companies involved. For an acquisition, I'm considering moving the acquired company to a sub domain of the parent company e.g. aquiredcompany.parentcompany.com. On both websites there wmay be a prominant popup so visitors can switch between the websites if they have visited the incorrect one. One worry I have is the acquired company has some good rankings, which I want to keep. I will of course manage the process through 301 redirects. But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this approach or can suggest any better solutions. Thanks in advance, Stuart
Web Design | | Stuart260 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 🙂 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
White Text / Black Background & SEO Impact
Does anyone know of any testing / studies with evidence that Google prefers dark text on a light background vs. light text on a dark background? I have a website that currently has light text on a black background, and really like the way it looks, but am concerned that the style may be hurting SEO. Moreover, redesigning something inverse with the same quality would be a large project and fairly costly, so I'd like to make sure the benefit will really be worth the cost before moving forward.
Web Design | | Bromtec0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
URLs with Hashtags - Does Google Index Them?
Hi there, I have a potential issue with a site whereby all pages are dynamically populated using Javascript. Thus, an example of an URL on their site would be www.example.com/#!/category/product. I have read lots of conflicting information on the web - some says Google will ignore everything after the hashtag; other people say that Google will now index everything after the hashtag. Does anybody have any conclusive information about this? Any links to Google or Matt Cutts as confirmation would be brilliant. P.S. I am aware about the potential issue of duplicate content, but I can assure you that has been dealt with. I am only concerned about whether Google will index full URLs that contain hashtags. Thanks all! Mark
Web Design | | markadoi840 -
How will it affect my site if i link to a site with adult content?
We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.
Web Design | | MattWheatcroft0 -
Footer backlinks for sites I've developed
I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop. Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching. This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
Web Design | | sanchez1960
2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do. Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0
