SEO Blow-Up After Site Redesign

[ToughTimesLawyer]

I contracted with a local web design firm - a highly recommended firm - to redo my law practice's Wordpress site.  The redesign was done in early April.  After the redesign I saw a large drop in rankings across all of my keywords, lost internal page rank, and had a big traffic drop.  The site is www.toughtimeslawyer.com. There were a couple of issues that contributed to it; but I'm not sure how to rebuild.

1. The internal URL structure changed completely.  I wasn't aware of this until the site went live.
2. I didn't have a sitemap for about a week, then the sitemap plugin they used was not very good and showing errors in Webmaster tools.  Last week, I replaced it with Yoast's SEO plugin.
3. The biggest problem is that they setup a subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com, without asking me or telling me.  The subdomain had all of my content on it.  It was not blocked with robots.txt; and it is being cached by Google.  I just discovered it today, when I was doing something in my cpanel.  I assume that this is creating a duplicate content problem with Google.

I'm not sure what steps to take to recover.  I am especially concerned about the subdomain old.toughtimeslawyer.com and the best want to handle it with the search engines.

Thanks in advance, all advice is appreciated. I've been pulling my hair out for the last few weeks over my rankings.

[QuarterPie]

That's not too difficult to handle. Here is how I would go about it.

I would first fix the existing website 404s, yes you have some as I checked your website.

next, I will set up the 301s from old website urls to new urls and also install a 404 monitor plugin.

also I woulld suggest that without deleting the copy that we have in old subdmain, if you can 301 everything there to www instead of old.domain.com, that will help.

[toddmumford]

Hi David, I feel your pain. This type of problem is more common than you might think!

Fortunately there are steps we can implement to help curb the effects.

1. You need a copy of the old website. This is probably available at old.toughtimeslawyer.com so that you can revert to the old website, or check for errors. So while they should have noindexed that domain, it is helpful to have it. I would recommend asking them to noindex it now.

2. You will need to map the old pages to the new, and then apply redirection and / or 404, depending on the page in question. For now, I would simply 301 redirect the old pages.

There are two ways to go about this:

A) Ask the developers to match the old urls on the new website. This is preferred, because it then means the same url is being used and no redirection needs to take place. I would ask them this first, but if they are not able to do this then:

B) Apply a 301 redirection schema to redirect old pages to the new corresponding pages on the new, live site:

Depending on how many pages you have on the site (sites over 100 pages you might consider using tools for assistance) you will want to create an excel which maps

Column A - old URL
Column B - new URL which now holds this information

Your job is to match the old content on the old subdomain with the new, live content.

Once this is completed, and triple checked, backup everything and then ask the development company to apply 301 redirection from the OLD urls to the NEW urls. This passes some of the link weight, age and authority over to the new url, and tells the search engines to place emphasis on the new urls for content.

3. Once completed, I would run the following checks (or hire someone to help you with this)

-Redirection check (ensuring those redirects are correct by checking header responses)
-Broken links check on the new website
-Navigation and internal links check

Depending on the gravity of the design change, this might not completely restore rankings. Ranking in Google based upon a myriad of factors, and site quality and layout is one of them. There is much more to the overall process, but the information above should help you resolve the current issue as much as possible.

Changing designs is a complex process and should be always proceeded with caution.

Once you make the changes, I recommend a period of about 2 weeks to monitor changes.

Hope this helps!

[jesse-landry]

Ooops - Mark beat me to it. Sounds like he and I are on the same page pretty much. I'd drop that old site entirely though. The CSS is broken and it looks awful. Just make sure those 301s are in place.

[jesse-landry]

Well that's too bad. First off I find that very odd he would keep the old site live. I would yank that immediately after I 301'd my link profiles. If you have ANY incoming links that you find relevant or worthwhile you need to have those redirected to the appropriate pages on your new site. Yoast can do that.

Drop that subdomain. The Way-back machine is always there if you need to reference it, but also you should have it backed up locally just in case.

The sitemap isn't a huge issue, Google will crawl your site assuming there are a few links incoming. As for why your SERPs dropped, that could be due to any number of things. You've got some decent links coming in, but of course we could all use more so get to content building and promoting for sure.

You might want to look at what your old sites did differently in terms of keyword placement. Titles, Headers, Ratio, etc are all important. Just keep in mind it needs to stay natural while clearly being about your targeted keyword. This should be easy enough to do. If I'm writing about bankruptcy that word is going to pop up organically plenty of times. Just make sure it's in your URLs, H1s, Titles, etc. The Moz on-page reports can help with this.

This is all I got right now.. Hope it's at least a tiny help.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Ok - so a few things - I'm not worried about the sitemaps - those aren't a big deal (should be fixed, but not first priority).

In my eyes, you need to do 2 things pronto:

1 - remove the old.toughtimeslawyer subdomain - do this by blocking the subdomain via the subdomain's robots.txt - do a disallow: / in the robots file, and then go into the webmaster tools for the subdomain (which you should set up if you haven't already), and use the URL removal tool to remove the subdomain from Google. Once this is done, and the subdomain is no longer indexed, add a noindex meta tag to all pages and remove the robots.txt block - this should get rid of the subdomain permanently from the index.

2 - you need to get a handle on the 301 redirects - crawl your current site structure, and redirect any old URLs to the new URLs - you should keep a close eye on the 404 errors and soft 404 errors sections in Google Webmaster Tools, and make sure to fix those errors as they pop up. This can be time consuming, but it's key. Set up a redirection plugin for your wordpress - the redirection plugin can also track 404 errors and then you can tell them where they should redirect. While this should have been done in advance and is key to any properly planned and organized site migration, you can do this after the fact and try to catch as many of these 404s as well. I'd also look at your inbound links from OSE or some other tool, and make sure those pages are redirected to their proper location, so you preserve the inbound link juice.

These are the key things in my mind you should do according to your post. Good luck!