New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
-
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site.
My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all?
The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map.
Any help would be gladly received.
Thanks
James
-
It can take a while, sometimes up to a few months. Google doesn't work fast, and it looks like you have already resubmitted the sitemap and fetched the pages. When we launched our new site, we saw a drop for a month, then we started to come back. Now after 6 months, we are higher than we ever were.
"Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages"
Agreed.
Was the new site launched on the same domain?
-
If you want to DM me a few more details I'll take a quick look. Did you make any significant changes... hosting/domain/CMS? Have you compared speed of updated site to old one?
-
Thanks for your response, most of the urls remained the same and the small amount that weren't were 301'd correctly.
The things we are noticing are some less optimal anchors and the HTML site map missing but the XML site map correct.
I will look into the possibility of toxic links but I think this is less likely as there are not too many links and it seems a massive coincidence that it happened 3 days after the site update, but who knows!
-
Thanks for the article, the old site has been restored but the rankings have not come back after 3 days, would you have expected them to be back now?
-
Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages. I can't imagine the new site having enough technical issues or things wrong with on page optimization to cause the drop. It is also interesting timing, as the latest Penguin update happened recently, so the new site may not be the problem at all, but instead could be toxic links.
-
This is very useful when you're managing a migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos - without specific details I can't advise on other issues...
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
-
How can a site rank high without any visible SEO tactics?
Hi SEO specialists, I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but there is something bugging me for awhile now, so I thought let's give it a try. I work for several clients and one of them works in the Psychic business. Since a few months we see that site from Psychicvop.com is taking over all kinds of top rankings in Google. The strange thing is that I can't detect anything that I always learned which is basic material for SEO. There isn't much content and there link profile isn't really spectacular either. Does any of you have an idea what it is about this sites that makes them outrank every other site in the business?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiveFootballTickets0 -
Drop in Rankings
UPDATE* I temporarily removed the images from the page to check if rankings would come back and they did. So Google made a recent update in the Netherlands where they look at your page for adult content (pictures). For us it was breast augmentations, before and after pics. END Hey Guys, We have a site for plastic surgery in the Netherlands. We ranked on number 2 if someone searched for breast augmentation. But sinds 31 of januari our ranking dropped outside the top 50. I did not get a warning or an other message in Search Console. We have a lot of pictures on the website displaying before and after pictures. So you see breasts. Does anybody know if google rolled out an update where they look at photo's with audult content? We didnt do any linkbuilding or other black hat stuff. Kind regards, Ruud
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | equipezorgbedrijven0 -
Wondering if creating 256 new pages would cause duplicate content issues
I just completed a long post that reviews 16 landing page tools. I want to add 256 new pages that compare each tool against each other. For example: Leadpages vs. Instapage Leadpages vs. Unbounce Instapage vs. Unbounce, etc Each page will have one product's information on the left and the other on the right. So each page will be a unique combination BUT the same product information will be found on several other pages (its other comparisons vs the other 15 tools). This is because the Leadpages comparison information (a table) will be the same no matter which tool it is being compared against. If my math is correct, this will create 256 new pages - one for each combination of the 16 tools against each other! My site now is new and only has 6 posts/pages if that matters. Want to make sure I don't create a problem early on...Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martechwiz0 -
How get an image on a third party site rank high on goode images?
Hello, I have sometimes articles written about my product online, is there anything else I can do except make a good file name for it, perhaps I can ask the site owner to modify in the article to make it rank higher? Also on some small websites I can see that images rank very high for the specific search term that is difficult to rank for in images, if I were to contact the site with a sponsored post request, what I should make sure the site adds except filename to that sponsored post... I think there are also some other methods such as reddit to make images rank high on third party page, just need to find out how... thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
New Site Launch - Redirecting Hundreds of Old Invalid URLs?
We have a client whose WMT shows a ton of "Not found" crawl errors after a new site launched. The URLs are largely a bunch of files that they had previously uploaded on their old site which have external links pointing at them. What is their best course of action, if they don't have files on the new site that correspond with these old files? Redirect to the home page? Leave them 404ing? Customize 404 message? (Note: They're mostly generic, non-human friendly URLs that are difficult to identify like /gallery3.php/ppage/3, g/interior.php/pid/3/sid/24, /uploads/1213196781.pdf)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VTDesignWorks0 -
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time?
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time? Would it make a difference in terms of ranking the site? Interested in your thoughts. Thanks! BBuck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today
Our website www.turbocupones.com dropped drastically in ranking today. I have no idea why this happened as we have not outsourced any SEO and sticked to google´s guidelines. Can you please check the web and give me Ideas why this happened? Our traffic dropped by 1000%. All our content is unique. I have years of experience in SEO and never had a problem like this. The rankings dropped drastically for everything. As said all SEO done is white hat. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch0