Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?

[martin1970]

Hi,
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover.

We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then).

So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits?

If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database?

The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time?

Cheers

Martin

[GastonRiera]

Hi Martin,

Too bad to hear that you've lost that much traffic.

I'll try to answer you questions separately:

• Benefits of setting the 301 redirects? Yes, you'll be rewarded, probably not gaining all whats lost but still something.
• How long google keeps URLs? for ever. They have said that they keep that URLs forever and usually recrawl them to check whether they are sill gone or if something has changed
• Old URLs have links, redirecting would help? YES, definitely.

That said, please analyze all urls and make redirections that make sense. Do not redirect all to homepage or to few categories, make 1:1 redirections and those that don't have a correspondant.. To the most similar page or category.

It could come handy this articles about migrations:
The Website Migration Guide: SEO Strategy, Process, & Checklist - Moz Blog
The Ultimate SEO Guide for Successful Web Migrations at #DigitalOlympus - AleydaSolis
Migration Best Practices - SMX London 2018 <- backedup by JohnMu in this tweet

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR