Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
-
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words.
I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible.
Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live!
...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion.
I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice.
Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it?
Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca
Thanks
-
Really sorry to hear the new site is still struggling, Nicolas. In some quick indexing tests, it certainly appears that your blog posts are being indexed, and I'm seeing them in the search results for the specific post titles. [See screenshot attached] It's possible this may have picked up in the 10 days since you posted this.
I'm assuming you submitted your site's xml sitemap to the correct www version of your Google Search Console? What does the sitemaps report indicate as far as the number of pages indexed compared the number submitted?
Certainly one of the tradeoffs of a site tool like Squarespace is that you have far less control of the code to implement technical SEO, but it shouldn't be so problematic that you lose rankings completely.
If you're interested, I'd be happy to share a short Skype chat to try to narrow down the issues. You can send me a private message through my account here at Moz.
Paul
-
Why thank you! Did some of that info help you out as well?
p.
-
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your detailed response. And sorry for the delay in my reply. I am currently focused on updating my knowledge on SEO as much as possible so that I can figure out what happened to our website ranking.
I have re-directed all the major pages on my website, and continue to redirect pages as I come across them, but there are fewer and fewer and I don't think they're very important.
I did discover some other troubling problems, though: I tried using the "view as text" feature of Google Cache to see how Google sees our site....And it looks terrible!
- There is a lot of duplicate content, including page titles, which is horrifying.
- Duplicate and even triplicate content arises where I used their carousels and sliders,
- The images do not have their original filenames, just some generic SquareSpace "static" name.
- There is little, if any alt text, and I'm not always sure where it comes from, as I didn't put it there.
To make matters worse, even though our website has been live for over a month, and I have submitted it to Google for indexing several times already, my blog posts still do not show up on Google. Even the ones that are featured on our home page. Even if you type their titles right into Google's search bar.
Ugh! It took me several months to build our new website, and I was very proud of the result. It looks beautiful. But, if it's that ugly to Google, I'm going to have to look for other options.
-
Paul, you rock!
-
Most welcome - happy to see another Canuck hereabouts My mom's just down the road from you in Arnprior.
If you were able to get the initial broken links review corrected within two weeks, that's great - not much of the authority should have dissipated.
However to note - the 404s in Search Console aren't the only ones that need to be fixed - they're just the ones Google has noticed and alerted you to so far. The problem with relying on GSC to tell you what to fix is that, by the time it has shown up in the Console, Google has already hit a 404 and been told it's a missing page. It's totally reactive, instead of proactive.
I'd strongly recommend you also use the other methods I mentioned to get more of the old URLs found & redirected as well before Google notices they're borked. It's also ideal if you can try to get the owners of the most valuable sites that linked to you in the past to update their links to point directly to the new pages. It's a bit of a battle, but even just a few updated can make a difference.
As far as how long until "link juice starts flowing" by which I assume you mean "rankings and traffic start to return" - the only real answer is "it depends", I'm afraid. You'll want to submit your new sitemap to GSC so that you can track the progress of the indexing of your new site's pages (on Squarespace, the URL to submit is www.kanataskinclinic.ca/sitemap.xml). You should also do this for Bing's Webmaster Tools.
Since URLs and content have changed, it's going to take some time for your site to fully re-index and for Google to understand the value of the new content. Could be from a few weeks to a month. It would also help to submit a few of the main section pages using the Fetch as Google tool in GSC and to get some new, strong incoming links to the site's pages. Good social links, and at least one or two new ones from relevant sites.
Lemme know if you have further ??s
Paul
-
Just to clarify, our new website was just launched two weeks ago. Hopefully, I haven't lost too much power from the old links?
-
Hi P.
Thank you so much for your informative reply.
I took your advice and went into my Google Search Console and checked for 404 errors. Google made it easy by listing all of the broken URLs. They even thoughtfully allowed me to download the list into a Google Doc so that I could keep track of my work as I fixed them.
I then went into my SquareSpace control panel and added 301 redirects for the broken pages. It was surprisingly easy to do, and they provided very clear, step-by-step instructions to help.
After doing this, I checked my Google Search Console to see if anything had changed. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the redirects were working immediately. Wow, fast!
Now that this problem is resolved, how soon does the link juice start flowing? In other words, how soon do you think it will affect our ranking?
-
And just to add - there is a shelf life on recovering all that page and link equity. The longer those old URLs 404, the more of the power of the old pages will erode away.
Two month is a long time - don't dally on getting those redirects started immediately.
P.
-
Regardless of the possible issues with the new design, yes, if you changed to new URLs on the new site and didn't implement correct 301-redirects from all the old URLs, you have essentially thrown away all the ranking authority and inbound links contributed by all of your old pages except the home page.
Since most homepages only rank for a small portion of the total number of terms for an established website, that's the primary cause of your immediate problem.
To fix it, you have some hard work ahead of you to capture as many of the old URLs as possible and write redirects to the new URLs. These old pages can be captured in a number of ways. The easiest initial method is to look up all the 404 errors in you Google Search Console, sort them by date, then start fixing all the ones after the date of the site change.
You can also use your Analytics data - create a report of all the page URLs of your site that received traffic in the year before the change, then sort them by highest traffic to prioritise where to start creating rewrites. You can also capture the current 404 errors in your Analytics data for high-priority pages to get redirected.
For a final more high tech solution, you can use Screaming Frog SEO Crawler to crawl the archive.org WayBack Machine version of your site to capture as many old URLs as possible.
Hope all that makes sense?
Paul
-
Not using 301s could be a big part of the problem. Do your old backlinks all point to existing pages on the new domain?
-
Hello,
According to Wayback machine, you've migrated your website after April,13.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160413071802/http://www.kanataskinclinic.ca/
We can see clearly that you have changed everything ! Design, photos... So you've changed the UX ! Text is important but Google takes user engagement into account, and if users are not reassured by your new design, you will never get back your positions ! In old design buttons are clearly identifiable, it's more simple to navigate, some menus are youseful like "Why choose us ?"... I think you'd better improve old design and navigation and forget the new one !
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
-
Core Web Vitals hit Mobile Rankings
Hey all, Ever since Google announced "Core Web Vitals" are mobile rankings have nose-dived. At first, I thought it was optimisation changes to the page titles we had made which might still be part of the issue. However, Desktop rankings actuallyy increased for the same pages where mobile decreased. There is the plan to introduce a new ranking signal into the Google algorithm called the "core web vitals: and this was discussed around late May. even though it's supposed to get fully indexed into a ranking signal later this year or early next; I think Google continuously test and release this items before any official release. If you weren't aware, there is a section in Google Webmaster Tools related to "core web visits", which looks at:1. Loading2. Interactivity3. Visual StabilityThis overlays some of the other basic requirements of a good website and mobile experience. Taking a look at our Google Search Console, it appears to be the following:1. Mobile- 1,006 poor URLs, 100URLs need improvement and 475 good URLs.2. desktop- 0 poor URLs, 379 need improvements and 1,200 good URLsSOURCE: https://search.google.com/search-console/core-web-vitals?resource_id=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.griffith.ie%2FIn the report, we can see two distinct issues with the mobile pages:CLS Issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)- 1,006 casesLCP issue: longer than 4secs (mobile) - 348 case_CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)This is a developer issue, and needs fixing. It's basically when a mobile screen jumps for the user. It is explained in this article: https://web.dev/cls/Seems to be an issue with all pages. **LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)_**Again, another developer fix that needs to be implemented. It's connected to page speed, and can be viewed here: https://web.dev/lcp/Looking at GCS, it looks like the blog content is mostly to blame.It's worth fixing these issues and again looking at the other items on page speed score tests:1. Leverage browser caching- https://gtmetrix.com/reports/griffith.ie/rBtvUC0F2. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=griffith.ie- mobile score for home page is 16/100, https://www.griffith.ie/people/thamil-venthan-ananthavinayagan is 15/100I think here is the biggest indicator of the issue at hand. Has anybody else noticed their mobile rankings go down and desktop stay the same of increase.Kind regards,
Web Design | | robhough909
Rob0 -
Website redesign- change of server . What to do with old site? Keep for a while or delete right away?
Hey Mozzers, Two days ago, we redesigned our website and changed the server at the same time to get faster loading times. Here is what we have done. The old site was hosted on ipage, new site with a new design hosted on UPCLOUD. We changed the A record to the new server, uploaded a new site, submitted a new sitemap to Google Search console, 301 redirected all old URLs to new ones, most have changed a bit. Old URLs were ending with " .html "the new ones do not have that at the end. Submitted AMP pages to Google as well. Now here is my question. Should we delete the old site completely from ipage or should we keep it for a while? Google has indexed the new URLs that were created with the redesign, these URLs did not exist on the old site. But it still shows most of the old URLs on SERPs (these are URLs that have been 301 redirected to a new equivalent page) I understand 2 days is not very long for Google to get everything right, but I am not sure what we should do with the old site? Keep it or get rid of it to help Google index the new one only. FYI every single old URL that appears on Google search when clicked on will take you to the right place, we made sure there are no 404s at all. As this is very important to our business and we get most of it from Google I want to make sure we do it right for SEO purposes. The agency that designed the site did not really know the answer to that question, as they do not have SEO specialists. Please help, any input you might have will be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | Davit19850 -
NO Meta description pulling through in SERP with react website - Requesting Indexing & Submitting to Google with no luck
Hi there, A year ago I launched a website using react, which has caused Google to not read my meta descriptions. I've submitted the sitemap and there was no change in the SERP. Then, I tried "Fetch and Render" and request indexing for the homepage, which did work, however I have over 300 pages and I can't do that for every one. I have requested a fetch, render and index for "this url and linked pages," and while Google's cache has updated, the SERP listing has not. I looked in the Index Coverage report for the new GSC and it says the urls and valid and indexable, and yet there's still no meta description. I realize that Google doesn't have to index all pages, and that Google may not also take your meta description, but I want to make sure I do my due diligence in making the website crawlable. My main questions are: If Google didn't reindex ANYTHING when I submitted the sitemap, what might be wrong with my sitemap? Is submitting each url manually bad, and if so, why? Am I simply jumping the gun since it's only been a week since I requested indexing for the main url and all the linked urls? Any other suggestions?
Web Design | | DigitalMarketingSEO1 -
Advice on estate agent website SEO next steps
Hi everyone, I have been working on the SEO for this website for a while now and have had a good amount of success increasing the traffic and rankings. However our main hurdle is improving conversions on the actual website - we want to encourage more people to book a valuation. Does anybody have any suggestions on how we can improve this? The website is www.richardkendall.co.uk Thank you
Web Design | | sophiecrosby970 -
How to optimise non-homepage to beat homepage in rankings? Are we on right path?
Hi all, We have a page with "keyword" in slug like "website.com/keyword" where our homepage is "website.com". This "keyword" difficulty is very high, so every minor factor contributing here and we have noticed competitors' pages with "keyword" in URL ranking. Then we also planned to rank this page "website.com/keyword" and interlinked high, so it'll be favoured by Google which didn't happen. So may be we should reduce the interlinking to homepage and optimise this keyword page more to rank for this keyword. Still I doubt the chances of ranking this page is difficult and need much more. How to make this page ranked replacing homepage? If there are no options for this, we are planning to redirect our homepage to this page; so Google will slowly adopt it. Suggestions please. Thank you.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Redesigning a really old Website with old-fashioned permalinks
Hey SEO-Pros, I'm currently redesigning a quite old website, with the following URL structure: TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 The new Version will be a little more SEO-friendly: TLD/interviews/name-of-interview/ I know I have to do a 301-Redirect for all the old URLs to the new ones in order to keep the (until now pretty good) Google Ranking. If the rankings drop after the redesign has been done, I'll surely get killed 😉 So, Is there any easy way of creating these 301-Redirects (must be thousands of URLs...)? Best Regards guys and thanks for your help!
Web Design | | dominator0 -
Is it common to have some of error/warning(currency duplicate,redirect, etc...) in most website that rank well?
Hi could any body could give me some idea on 'on page optimisation' Currently in my campaign I have around 3000+ errors, 14,000+ warning, 7000+ notices for the following reasons: Overly-Dynamic URL
Web Design | | LauraHT
Temporary Redirect
Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)
Duplicate Page Title
etc... First of all I know these have negative effect on SEO. Now to fix towards those issues it involve lots of works and times. At the same time most of our important keywords/url rank position have not changed over the last 12 months. Does that mean the above has only limited negative effect? I just want to know is it worthy to invest the man/hour/money to clean those issues. As it involves decent development time. Is it common to have some of error/warning in most website that rank well? (e.g. I 've seem may big website have duplicate title/meta-desc on their currency variant page)0 -
Removing important section of website, safely
Hi Mozzers, It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed. It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page. I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective? What's the best approach to this? Thanks in advance! Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0