Recovering from a site migration
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Enquiries stopped after site move
Hello, I really hope someone can help. We recently moved our website from a shared server with one host to a VPS with another. At the same time we decided it would be right to switch from the .co.uk to the .com and also purchase an SSL. Since the switch we have had zero enquiries (3 weeks ago) when we would normally average one a day. According to Google Analytics, I cannot see that traffic has been to adversely effected and rankings, though dropping very slightly have not dramatically fallen. We have tested the site rigirously and there are no issues with it we can see. I ensured at domain level that there was a 301 redirect on the .co.uk site as well. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this would be the case? And/or whether switching it all back to where it was with the .co.uk would be a foolish idea? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Opus4Marketing0 -
Site Has Not Recovered (Still!) from Penguin
Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinaMumm0 -
Site re-design, full site domain A/B test, will we drop in rankings while leaking traffic
We are re-launching a client site that does very well in Google. The new site is on a www2 domain which we are going to send a controlled amount of traffic to, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% to 100% over a 5 week period. This will lead to a reduction in traffic to the original domain. As I don't want to launch a competing domain the www2 site will not be indexed until 100% is reached. If Google sees the traffic numbers reducing over this period will we drop? This is the only part I am unsure of as the urls and site structure are the same apart from some new lower level pages which we will introduce in a controlled manner later? Any thoughts or experience of this type of re-launch would be much appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leshonk0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Do follow or no follow on wordpress site?
I have read many different opinions on what links to make do follow on a wordpress website versus which ones to leave as no follow. (internal and external) There does not seem to be any consensus among the inputs to date. Any perspectives on this would be appreciated. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0