Botched domain migration
-
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic.
All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then...
Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump
Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels
Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic).
Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over.
Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really.
Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished.
Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
-
One more detail of note
The old site still shows in google site: search, two full years after everything is 301'ed.
Change of address was not used - is that critical to ensure that PR passes?
If so - it doesnt allow redirecting into a subfolder - what do you recommend in this cases - temporarily change our 301 to point to newsite.com instead of newsite.com/subfolder in able to get past this blocker in the GSC change of address tool?
"The old site redirects to newsite.com/xxxx, which does not correspond to the new site you chose."
-
Hi David, I will shoot you a PM, I think thats best. Thanks for your offer.
-
Hi Sonar,
Sorry to hear about your migration troubles!
I don't think you will find generic advice too helpful, but I'd be happy to take a quick look to see what's going on and possibly give you some specific recommendations.
Are you able to share the domains with me in this thread or through PM?
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
-
Is it worth keeping a decades-old domain that's merely 301 redirecting to the main domain?
Hi fellow Moz SEOs, We have a bigger client who we just did an SEO Site Audit for, and it was discovered that they have several domain names that are simply 301 redirecting to their main domain name. One of their domains in particular is decades old, and the client is asking if there is any value in keeping it (and the others), or simply leaving them as-is. Considering the domain age, does anyone have any recommendations? Much appreciated, Zack Barton
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zack
Barton Interactive
(833) 442.6853 // office
(408) 910.7750 // mobile
https://bartoninteractive.com0 -
Site Migration Question
Hi Guys, I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms. Pretty much a perfect storm. Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding. She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect. However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error. I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of: DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client) Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link. I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration. We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Khoo0 -
How to build Domain Authority?
My site: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/ has started to drop Domain Authority in the past weeks, however less quality sites like http://silverstories.com.au/ are rising... I am not sure why? Is there someway I can understand why my site would suddenly start dropping authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Better Domain and Page Authority Than my compeitors
Hi All, I have a pretty extensive question but wanted a starting point if you don't mind. I have a situation where I created 4 sites that I would say are almost identical other than I have loaned my other websites to other agents. My content is rewritten but it's still roughly the same. You will see, when I give the URL's, that they are similar, and almost identical in templates.My question is going to be, Since I have built some authority on all of these sites, is it wise to simply take them down, or just change the templates and take away the content and start over. If so, what do I do with the existing pages? Or is there a better idea I'm not thinking of? My other question is, this site: goo.gl/Tf00rc Is my main site. It has a higher domain authority and page authority than any of my other local competitors, yet I'm still ranked #13-15 for my main keywords. I will say, many of my other competitors have older domains and I'm sure didn't try to manipulate the serps either. Thoughts and recommendations? Here are my other similar sites which have almost identical templates and very similar content but not copied and pasted content. 1. goo.gl/Wwb0Tg 2. goo.gl/3gpR1X 3. goo.gl/FwD8Bk 4. goo.gl/vpuQv2 My dilemma: I want to make sure that my other agents have a great site that can perform well, as well. If I completely remove these sites, they have no site. I'll say that right now the sites that get the most traffic are the goo.gl/Tf00rc and goo.gl/Wwb0Tg then is the goo.gl3gpR1X, and lastly goo.gl/FwD8Bk so they all get about 3k, 2k, and 1k and 500 visits a month respectively. The total visits of all of these is pretty good. I feel like the max would visits would be around 10k per month in my market. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have spent a lot of time and money getting these sites where they are only to be penalized, I'm sure, for duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Veebs0 -
Existing 301s during site migration - what to do?
Hi - I'm looking at an old website and there are lots of 301s internal to that site - what do I do with these when I move to a new site? Should I list them and adjust them so they redirect to the new site now (instead of from one URL to another URL on the old site) - I'm thinking that if I don't the user will have to travel through one 301 then another to get to the new site, which doesn't seem like a great idea? Your thoughts would be welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
PageRank vs. Domain Authority
A web-site has PR5 but in OSE I see that Domain Authority is only 26. I've also checked and the domain was registered in 2009. Is this normal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ditoroin0 -
Duplicate content on sub-domains?
I have 2 subdamains intented for 2 different countries (Colombia and Venezuela) ve.domain.com and co.domain.com. The site it's an e-commerce with over a million products available so they have the same page with the same content on both sub-domains....the only differences are the prices a payment options. Does google take that as duplicate content? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0