Recovering from a site migration
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Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted.
To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?
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Hi. Thanks for your comments. The migration happened six months ago, and there's no sign of recovery. I've seen quite a few big migrations tank due to mass redirects, and every one I've worked on that kept URLs largely the same has been fine.
Our crawl errors are now pretty low, and we keep working through any that come up. It's frustrating work!
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I wouldn't think that's your problem or your answer. If you've been working on it for months and recently did the migration, it can take some time for the redirects to take effect. Are you verifying that new URLs are being indexed? If they are, are they receiving the same traffic as the old ones? If not, what's different about the content on those pages? Did you drastically change your navigation or your content? If you made sure that, at least, you redirected old pages that were getting search traffic and had exterior links to them, things should pick up again.
If you made the redesign as an organic SEO effort for a site that didn't already have enough authority to bring in the search traffic that you want, the redesign probably isn't going to help. If you redesigned a site or URLs that didn't get crawled often, the redesign isn't likely to help them get crawled more often. You have to make sure that your new URLs are indexed and then compare their search traffic to the old URLs in order to determine if there is a problem.
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Sorry to hear you're having trouble after your migration, it's all too common to see this happen when sites are migrated or new sites go live.
The most important thing is to make sure all old pages have been 301 redirected to the relevant new page / if no relevant page to the homepage.
The drop in rankings could be due to backlinks pointing at pages which now 404 - if you haven't already use a backlink explorer such as Open Site or Majestic SEO and make sure none of your incoming backlinks are 404's, if they are get them redirected asap.
Has the site moved to a new domain or is it just a relaunch?
Also have a look at this article on site migration - http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
Danny
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