Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Organic Traffic Drop of 90% After Domain Migration
-
We moved our domain is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com on April 4th. It was migrated to https://www.metro-manhattan.com
Google Search Console continues to show about 420of URLs indexed for the old "NYC" domain. This number has not dropped on Search Console. Don't understand why Google has not de-indexed the old site.
For the new "Metro" domain only 114 pages are being shown as valid. Our search volume has dropped from about 85 visits a day to 12 per day. 390 URLs appear as "crawled- currently not indexed". Please note that the migrated content is identical. Nothing at all changed. All re-directs were implemented properly.Also, at the time of the migration we filed a disavow for about 200 spammy links. This disavow file was entered for the old domain and the new one as well.
Any ideas as to how to trouble shoot this would be much appreciated!!! This has not been very good for business.
-
Very hard to say what's going on Kingalan1 without a detailed analysis. You've done a domain and https migration at the same time. It could just be a result of the transition given Google will have indexed multiple versions of the same content. Give it some more time. After that, if things don't improve you'll need to do a detailed analysis to diagnose what the problem is.
-
Hi Donna:
Yes, on official domain change got processed via Google Search Console.
I ran a MOZ crawl of the site. Every URL including the home page has a domain authority of 1. Previously the DA of the home page was 23.
No wonder the ranking and traffic dropped of the cliff! Assuming redirects were implemented correctly, (they were) is such a drop in DA normal after a migration?
Thanks,
Alan -
Did you use google search console to tell google you were switching to a new domain?
-
Yes, 301 redirection was done. We only had a handful of 404 errors. At the start the process appeared to progress very smoothly. Ranking dropped on all URLs. Some important URLs experienced a lesser drop (say position 2 to position 10). Most pages dropped form say position 12 to 60.
No content was changed during the move. Only 2 changes were:
-Different domain
-Secure domain (HTTPS).The old domain was www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
The new domain is https://www.metro-manhattan.comActually the number of daily visitors has dropped from 80 to about 10. The migration occurred on April 3rd, about 16 days ago.
The number of impressions Google is serving us is gradually increasing. But because the ranking is so low, the number of clicks is low.
So your suggestion is to incorporate keyword rich content into pages that ranked well previously? Do you think this will revive ranking?
Is it possible that this drop is normal and that ranking should recover in the next 60-90 days?
Or should I be concerned something has gone wrong? -
Did you do 301 redirection to each and every URL?
Did you downloaded all the URL’s by signing in to your FTP or Cpanel account?
Did you change any content, meta tags or onpage elements?
Login to your google analytics account and export All Pages under site content. Compare the pages and find out if the pages are same for before site migration and after site migration is completed.
How many 404 errors did you receive in your google webmaster accounts. 404 errors will be generated if user’s click the url’s from google search or links present any where on the internet. Try to create an alternative page or redirect that to some other similar page.
You are saying that your traffic dropped from 1000 to 150. Did you checked which keywords ranking dropped, remain constant or improved, what is the landing page and ranking. 150 traffic that you are receiving are for the same pages that used to rank before or are new pages.
Try to find all the landing pages that used to rank for your important keywords, map your keywords to that URL and also try to add informational keyword rich content on the landing page that used to rank before website migration this may help in improving your rankings.
For more detail information read this Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs
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
-
Huge Drop in Direct Traffic in G4
Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseninja1 -
Sub Domain Usage
I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com. Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate? Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc? What are the pros and cons to each?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb81780 -
Is it possible to have organization markup schema for sub domain ? and how should it look like ?
Can we have organization markup schema for subdomain ? For example if my main domain is xyz.com and subdomain is sub.xyz.com If i plan to have organization markup schema for subdomain how should it look like ? Should the markup schema must have main domain url or sub domain url in markup schema ? Should it be like this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clarkovitch0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0