Should we reinstate the old website?
-
In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well.
A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?
-
The true answer to reinstating the old site depends upon the quality of work done on the many parts of the job by the PR agency. If this was my site, and it was performing kickass before these PR guys got their hands on it, I would toss the old version back up and do a deeper assessment - because the results thus far suggest that the PR agency doesn't know much about SEO.
<kibitz>In the past few years a lot of PR agencies have become spammers who wear suits to work.</kibitz>
-
If the refresh was just because the site looked dated, why was all the content updated?
A complete rebuild of the site seems a little drastic if it only needed a facelift. Were there other concerns?
As Kevin asked, were 301s set up? if there were no 301's set up, any previous links will no longer be passing juice, which could have a serious impact.
-
Were 301 redirects put in place? If so, was the content, more or less, the same? Was there specific pages that dropped in traffic and others stayed the same? Did you see anything in Search Console?
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
-
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Best use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
How to point a framework to your website
Hi, my client use the NJOYN framework to insert all of the new job post on his website. The problem is that this framework is not hosted at the same place that his website is hosted. This create 2 domain name. First: Example.com second: example.njoyn.com How can I tell google that example.noyn.com link with the site example.com? Can I do this by simply 301 redirect the domain from example.njoyn.com to example.com? I know that this is a framework, is there a way to have access to their htaccess file? Finally, is there a way to rewrite example.njoyn.com/job1 to example.com/job1? Thanks alot
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Website Down
Hello guys, My website hasn't been reachable for couple of hours today and I can't really understand why as no links have been built, all the best practices have been followed regarding on page optimization. I also checked google webmaster tools and there are no warning messages, crawl problems or anything so I don't understand why this has happened. Now for some reason the website is up and running again.
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar1 -
Old documents online as link juice
Each month I upload my auction catalog in different formats (word, pdf and rtf). I have about 9 years of catalogues online that have all been indexed by Google. In each catalog there is a link to my terms and conditions page (which has made the page authority for that page quite high in some unusual, but desired keywords), there is also many, many mentions of non-desired keywords in each of those documents and links to my domain. Is it worth updating all these old, previously indexed catalogues with better keyword juice and more relevant links ? Would they even get re-visited by google ? I suppose that leads to the next question... is it worth adding each of these pages to my sitemap ? To this point I have only added my major pages, not any of the subordinate pages etc.
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article
I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website - http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-ideas/save-money-and-create-diversity-seeds-and-small-plants-are-better/ I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website - SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?
Technical SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
How best to optimise a website for more than one location?
I have a client who is a acupuncturist and operates clinics both in Chester and Knutsford in Cheshire the site performs well for Chester based terms such as "Chester acupuncture" this is the primary location the client wishes to focus efforts on but would also like to improve rankings for the Knutsford clinic and area. I have setup local places pages for each clinic and registered each on different local directories. Both clinic addresses are placed on each page of the website and have a map to each on the contact page. Most of the on-page SEO elements such as page titles, descriptions and on-page keywords mainly focus on the term "Chester" over "Knutsford" is it advisable to target both locations in these page elements or will local search have an effect on this and will reduce/ dilute overall rankings for Chester clinic? I haven't setup and separate page for each clinic location as this might help in terms of SEO for improving ranking for both locations but from a user point of view it would just duplicate the same content but for a different location and also would create duplicate content issues. Any advice/ experience on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Seo template for new website
I am revamping my website (www.UltimateBasicTraining.com). It's going to be major and I am concerned about the potential traffic loss since over 60% of my overall traffic comes from organic search results in the military basic training area. Are there any good SEO website templates I can start from? I see a lot out there but would prefer the advice of professionals. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TheVolkinator0