Website Migration and SEO

[AlexVelazquez]

Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly.

All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[AlexVelazquez]

Thanks Jeff! Your response was very helpful. It is true that the old domain contained a competitive keyterm which was lost in the migration. The competition is also higher for that space so this explains why we took a hit in PageRank. I will be working on regaining that competitive edge in the coming months.

Thanks again!

• Sheena

[customerparadigm.com]

Sheena -

Two out of three isn't bad

Without seeing the actual sites, my best guess is that the www.product.com is an strong domain name with exact match keywords. And when it was moved over to the brandname.com/product the new location didn't work as well as in the past.

301 Redirects transfer about 85% of the link value, according to the Moz blog article here:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

"When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity."

According to an interview with Google's Matt Cutts: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021832.html

"Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn't link to it on the new domain?"

_ "Matt Cutts: That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301)."_

Perhaps the other two that are performing well are in a less competitive space; this one might be more competitive from other established players in the industry.

For the other two sites, taking a 15% hit probably didn't make a difference, but for the one site, it's likely that it did.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff