Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL

[Canada_wide_media]

Howdy Mozzers

I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me!

***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing

Background

The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change.

Problem

Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline.

*They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous

Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.

Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get.

Redirects

During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up:

Original:

http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume

--301--

http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume

--301--

http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume

Canonical issue

On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013.

Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example).

Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda)

According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However -

Sitemap

We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?

That page is in the sitemap.

Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z

Change Frequency: Yearly

Priority: 0.5

*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca

What we looked at so far

• The redirects are all currently 301’s

• GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch

• We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be.

• Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank.

• We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials

• We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1).

• Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)

[Canada_wide_media]

Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them.

Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people!

Mark

[EGOL]

About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B.  Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo.  Nothing.  NOTHING.  Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.

Rankings and traffic immediately tanked.  I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time.  I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.

Now it was #2.  Crap!  I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.

I didn't do anything.   No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.

A few months later the rankings and traffic came back.  My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month.  When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc.  Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back.  Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.

[Chris.Menke]

It's very likely due to the domain switch but to give yourself something else to do to  do besides what you've done so far (and if you haven't done this already) and give yourself some direction to take while you're waiting for your rankings to come back up, go ahead and isolate how the drops in traffic are occurring:

• Research what keywords mapped to which of your old landing pages and which of those keywords are now bringing in less traffic.
• Did you completely fall out of the results for some of your keywords or have you just dropped somewhat in the rankings for all of your keywords?
• Are you now only ranking for brand terms?
• What specifically has changed with your traffic

At this time, you may do well by coming up with a strong content strategy and working the PR and G+ channels to get that content out to new and existing audience members--it can only help.

[danatanseo]

Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.

That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website."  We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.

If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.

Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.

That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.