Traffic down after site migration
-
Hi! I've been working on a campaign for http://www.alwayshobbies.com/, which has seen a 35% in drop in traffic since changing ecommerce platforms. It's now been two months, but there is no sign of recovery.
We are in the middle of cleaning up the link profile as part of a resubmission request, but that has been ongoing since before the migration. A lot of redirects were needed after 10k 404s appeared in Webmaster Tools after the new launch, but these have been reduced to around 500. We've been pretty thorough here, but I thought it would be worth checking in case there's something we've missed.
-
just make sure your redirects are good. Fix those asap and make sure the site doesnt have any crawl issues. Check out your page speed since you just moved to a new platform. Get the onpage stuff done asap to start getting the traffic back
-
I do see that it is a large site so managing these kinds of things becomes more difficult. We are getting ready to change platforms in May. My approach was to keep every URL the same as possible. I understand that 301's work but that doesn't mean that 301's are ideal. Cutts will say that these should pass the value but we really don't know what other factors are involved. In our case we will map every url and we will keep all the urls the same as possible. In the end we will still need to do a bunch of 301s. One area where we were able to fix a lot of problems was by requiring all product page urls, sub category, and main category urls to stay the same. Hope you figure it out.
-
Thanks Brad. It's a big ecommerce site, so I thought a few wouldn't be too much of an issue. Really interesting to read your experiences. I wonder if anyone out there has successfully resolved an issue like this before?
-
If there were 10,000 404's after launch then I believe something in the rebuild/redesign of the site was not worked through thoroughly enough. I have found that overall Google doesn't penalize sites for 404 errors but if I woke up one morning to 10,000 of them I wouldn't be surprised if Google kept me down for a while. For example, I purchased a blog last year. I didn't pay much for it but it had about 200,000 pageviews a month. I failed to pay any attention to it after purchase but one day woke up and my servers were spiking. I realized the the php handler was different than all my other WordPress sites so I had a developer switch it over for me. After the switch the server calmed down and then I didn't pay any attention to the site for a period of weeks. Then one day I went out to the site and clicked a link and it took me to a 404 page. Within minutes I realized that nearly every link was going to 404. When we changed the php handler the urls were changed for some reason. We quickly corrected the problem but Google has never restored our ranks. Now the site gets about 120,000 pageviews a month. It was 3 weeks but once I lost the ranks I never got them back. I don't have an exact answer for you but the fact there are still 500 404's is a huge problem. In my organizations we don't tolerate 404's for long. As soon as we find them to work to get them corrected. Woke up yesterday to 98 404's and sent over a spreadsheet to the dev team to fix.
Good luck!
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
-
Help, no organic traffic recovery after new site launch (it's been 6 months)!
I worked with a team of developers to launch a new site back in March. I was (and still am) in charge of SEO for the site, including combining 4 sites into 1. I made sure 301 redirects were in place to combine the sites and pretty much every SEO tactic I can think of to make sure the site would maintain rankings following launch. However, here we are 6 months later and YoY numbers are down -70% on average for organic traffic. Anyone mind taking a look at http://www.guestguidepublications.com and seeing if there's a glaring mistake I'm missing?!?!?! Thanks ahead of time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Annapurna-Digital1 -
Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
Hi, I look after two websites, one sells commercial mortgages the other sells residential mortgages. We recently redesigned both sites, and one was moved to a new domain name as we rebranded it from being a trading style of the other brand to being a brand in its own right. I have recently discovered that one of my most important pages on the residential mortgages site is not in Google's index. I did a bit of poking around with Copyscape and found another broker has copied our page almost word-for-word. I then used copyscape to find all the other instances of plagiarism on the other broker's site and there are a few! It now looks like they have copied pages from our commercial mortgages site as well. I think the reason our page has been removed from the index is that we relaunced both these sites with new navigation and consequently new urls. Can anyone back me up on this theory? I am 100% sure that our page is the original version because we write everything in-house and I check it with copyscape before it gets published, Also the fact that this other broker has copied from several different sites corroborates this view. Our legal team has written two letters (not sent yet) - one to the broker and the other to the broker's web designer. These letters ask the recipient to remove the copied content within 14 days. If they do remove our content from our site, how do I get Google to reindex our pages, given that Google thinks OUR pages are the copied ones and not the other way around? Does anyone have any experience with this? Or, will it just happen automatically? I have no experience of this scenario! In the past, where I've found duplicate content like this, I've just rewritten the page, and chalked it up to experience but I don't really want to in this case because, frankly, the copy on these pages is really good! And, I don't think it's fair that someone else could potentially be getting customers that were persuaded by OUR copy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Massive decreases in traffic
Hi i've been looking at the affects of googles algorithmic updates over the last couple years and the impact on sites/competitors i have been monitoring in the space. Two sites which surprised me, in having a dramatic decline in search traffic were: kriskris.com (over 200k visitors to around 10k) only-cookware.com (from 40k visitors at its peak to only around 1000k) (semrush traffic data attached) Both sites have great quality content and social signals. The only thing i can think of is a over-optimization of anchor text, and types of links. dnrm0Oa.png cuaLzrI.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Does Google punish sites for Backlinks?
Here is Matt Cutts video, for those of you who have not seen it already. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4dAWb5jUws (Very Short) In this Video Matt explains that Google does not look at backlinks. Many link spamming sites have detected, there have been many website receiving warning messages in their Google web tools to deindex these links, etc.. My theory is that Google will not punish sites for backlinks. However, they manually check for "link farming sites" and warn anyone affiliated with them, just in case these links were built from a competitor. This way they can eliminate all the "Bad Link Farm" sites and not hurt anyone who does not deserve to be hurt. Google is not going to give us all their information to rank, they dont want us to rank. They want us to PPC. However, they do want to have the best SERPs available. I call it Google juggling! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Do sites like these really work?
http://www.linkaloha.com/ This company claims to have a good tool. To me it looks like spam. They claim to automate link building and they claim to use Googles Panda to their advantage. This site does however use link diversity, not sure about how relevant the sources are for each keyword... Would this fall into black hat or gray area SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0