Transferring website onto a new domain and it has disappeared in the rankings
-
Hi,
First time posting!
Our website was page 1 for just about all local searches (legal related). Due to a rebrand we took the site over onto a new domain name and it has totally dropped - on average pages 8-9, even for local searches.
The transfer was done back in May, I did expect a hit but I assumed it would recover fairly quickly but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Any ideas/advice/tips would be greatly appreciated
Jamie
-
Thank you everyone. I've followed all the good practice suggestions etc. It's still WAY back in the rankings but is making progress!
-
Unfortunately, sometimes a drop like this is to be expected. Think about it - now you have a brand new domain age. Before, your older domain was helping your rankings. While that is not the only this negatively hurting you, it is one that is a big deal for the authority of your website.
I would work on building our your new website (both service pages and blogs) to indicate that you are THE authority in your local service area. Like Jordan said, definitely ensure that all your local citations are correct and updated with the new domain. If there are any inconsistencies this could be negatively impacting your rankings.
Rebuilding your rankings on a new domain can take time, so although this is not ideal, be patient and hopefully you will see an increase in rankings shortly.
-
Hi Jamie,
It sounds like you may not have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new site.
If that's the case, go and add these for each page asap! This could be all you need to get your rankings back.
Was it just a straight rebrand? Did the website template and content remain the same when the rebrand took place?
Feel free to send me a PM with the domain names and I can take a quick look for you to see if there are any other issues from the changeover.
Cheers,
David
-
Also what steps did you take during your site migration?
-
That is to be expected when you move a website to a new domain. What you can do is blog, link build and claim your local citations if you haven't already.
It will take time to build up your new domain just be patient.
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
-
301 Domain Redirect from old domain with HTTPS
My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen. My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms. If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time. backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version. Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out. My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Huge uptick in 404s on new website
I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless? There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period... Thanks for any thoughts. Screenshot-2015-05-19-13.58.55.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
What should the combined domain rank of 2 sites?
We have just combined 2 sites by redirecting a site with a domain ranking of 35 to a site with a domain ranking of 27 (this is because the we want to use the address with a ranking of 27) After a week I now have 1 domain with a ranking of 26?? So my questions are; Should the ranking have increased already? What should I expect the ranking to increase to if at all? Is there something I could have done wrong when transferring? Thanks
Technical SEO | | benj450 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Domain with more Languages
Hey folks! I was wondering what you would do. I do have a Website. The website is provided in 8 other languages. Right now every language has it's own Domain name. The domain name is always the country in the language. I'm thinking about combine everything to one domain and hope to get some great linkjuice from the other 7 domains. So it would be www.example.com/en/ www.example.com/fr/ and so on. How do you handle that. Would this have a big positive impact on that one domain I'm forwarding to?
Technical SEO | | leitpix
I really think so!0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
Redirecting a domain
I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot. "We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing. What would you suggest doing given the error message above. Thanks, Bill Sqnch.jpg
Technical SEO | | Marvo0