Redesign, new content, new domain and 301 redirects (penalty?)
-
We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight.
We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers.
Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?
-
Hi David
Thanks for your reply.
This is how we did it:
We redirected our old webshops with a 301 redirect on 07-07-12 to the new webshop. We had a new design, a lot of new content, new url structure, new product images etc. etc (but everything is unique) (we redirected everything to the root 300K pages)
Nothing special happened and we conacted an SEO company to do a page on page redirect for the most important pages and then let the other links 301 to the root.
On 23-07-12 we received our rankings back for 3 days, then there was a massive drop in rankings. Even the brand name is not showing up for the .com version.
Now we changed the 300K redirects into 404 pages.
So this is the situation:
The most important pages from our old webshops are page to page redirected to the new webshop. All other urls are now 404.
-
Hi,
Sorry to hear about your problems.
This could be a penalty, however I'd say it's more likely that it's the natural fluctuation you'd expect to see with a large scale move like this. I've never seen a major revamp like this have rankings settle within a few days, and I'd expect you to see similar fluctuations for the next month.
One question regarding the 301; did you redirect the old sites on a page level (e.g did you redirect oldsite.com/blue-widgets to newsite.com/blue-widgets), or did you just redirect the whole domain to the new home page? If you did the later, this would explain why you lost rankings.
However...
There are lots of rumours of another penguin update this week, so depending on the timescale it could be something to do with this. What where the link profiles of the previous sites like? If they contained loads of exact match anchor text, and a poor % of branded anchor text, then this could well be the issue.
There was also a Panda update recently, however if you are confident about the quality and originality of your content then it's less likely to be this.
Cheers
David
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
-
What happens when we canonical and point to a page which has been redirected to another page? Google response!
Hi all, I would like to know the different scenarios Google going to respond when we use canonical and redirect for duplicate pages. Let's say A to B are duplicate pages with 95% same content and C Doesn't have same content but context wise similar and priority page we expect to rank for. What happens if we canonical from A to B and set redirect from B to C? What if both A and B are pointed to C with canonical? What if A or B deleted and other one is canonical to C? Note: We can noindex or 301 redirect as they have their own visitors. This is more about showing most relevant content to the audience and avoid duplicate content in search results. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking drop after sub domain to sub directory migration. Usual?
Hi all, We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do back-links to non indexed sub-domains / sub-directories considered by Google as website backlinks and pass Pagerank to website?
Hi, If some noindexed links on our website or sub-domain got some backlinks, will that backlinks pass Pagerank / linkjuice to website? Will they be considered as backlinks to website by Google? Here is a statement from Matt cutts for the question. My question is same as below with answer? Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank? Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Can we ignore "broken links" without redirecting to "new pages"?
Let's say we have reaplced www.website.com/page1 with www.website.com/page2. Do we need to redirect page1 to page2 even page1 doesn't have any back-links? If it's not a replacement, can we ignore a "lost page"? Many websites loose hundreds of pages periodically. What's Google's stand on this. If a website has replaced or lost hundreds of links without reclaiming old links by redirection, will that hurts?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Condensing content for web site redesign
We're working on a redesign and are wondering if we should condense some of the content (as recommended by an agency), and if so, how that will affect our organic efforts. Currently a few topics have individual pages for each section, such as (1) Overview (2) Symptoms and (3) Treatment. For reference, the site has a similar structure to http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-overview-fact. Our agency has sent us over mock-ups which show these topics being condensed into one and using a script/AJAX to display only the content that is clicked on. Knowing this, if we were to choose this option, that would result in us having to implement redirects because only one page would exist, instead of all three. Can anyone provide insight into whether we should keep the topic structure as is, or if we should take the agency's advice and merge all the topic content? *Note: The reason the agency is pushing for the merging option is because they say it helps with page load time. Thank you in advance for any insight! Tcd5Wo1.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | ATShock1 -
Duplicate Pate Content - 404's or 301's?
I deleted about 100 pages of stale content 6 months ago and they are currently returning 404's. The crawl diagnostics have pointed out 77 duplicate pages because of this. Should I redirect these as 301's to get rid of the error or keep them as 404's? Most of the pages still have some page authority but I don't want to get penalized. Just looking for the best solution. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | braunna0 -
New Brand Tlds
Hi, So ICANN is going to be coming out with new custom brand TLD. Essentialy if I have got it right you can register something like .ibm .amazon instead of .com or .org My problem is I can't seem to find a creative way to leverage this. I can understand ibm having one for its brand but me ? What do you think? how can we can make use of this for seo and linkbuilding ? Cheers, Vishal
Algorithm Updates | | vishalkhialani0 -
.Co Domains - Any thoughts?
Hi Guys I'm not sure which section this one belongs in as I didn't see a section for domains/tlds. I wanted an opinion on the future of .co domains. We own a gift company (www.xperiencedays.com), as well as a gift recommendation site (www.uniquegifts.net), and invested in a few gift occasion .co domains (www.birthdaygifts.co, christmasgifts.co etc). This was partly because they were cheap and easy to come by, but also with a hope that they soon gain some public recognition. My question therefore is whether anyone within SEOMOZ has an opinion on whether .co will be widely accepted, whether they will (as google claims) be treated as a non-country specific url, and early success stories you know of, and finally whether the recent news from Overstock to rebrand as O.co (http://www.overstock.com/guides/faqs-about-o-co) is the kick start that .co need. I realize that is more than one question
Algorithm Updates | | bigtimeseo2