New site started ranking, lost ground after 301...?
-
Hi everyone. So we decided to re-brand a website starting with a fresh domain and fresh website (new everything).
The first 4 weeks the site was performing really well and started bringing organic traffic for several targeted keywords (small amounts, but something).
Around 5 weeks later, we decided to perform a 301 Redirect from an older site we had that really hadn't changed since 2007. As soon as we performed the 301, we started loosing ground on the keywords that were starting to perform. I may help to mention that we were targeting different keywords on the new site, versus the keywords/industry that were targeted on the older site... because we were focusing on another but similar industry.
Now, 10 weeks later we are still not showing up for the keywords that we were starting to make headway on in the first four weeks of starting.... any ideas why? suggestions?
The 301's were performed properly. We verified them, and we check Google WMT for any additional ones that may still be out there, but try to fix them as soon as possible. We have grown the site from just a few pages to over 60+ pages in the last 2 months with unique and fresh content targetting those keywords...
Thank you in advance
-
Any other suggestions/help on this? In my last post, I explained a little more in depth what the specific issue was. Please advice, thank you in advance.
-
Thanks Federico for the reply... the Company is still the same, but instead of just offering capentry services, we started offering full home improvement services... so we redirected our old (capentry specific) website to our new (home improvement).
So in the 1st 4.5 weeks the new home improvement site started to perform well for home-improvement related keywords... but after the redirect (which brought a lot of branded & carpentry traffic) the home-improvment keywords started fading away... for the past 2 weeks they have been non-existent.
We haven't done anything devious or sneaky to the site. There are no penalties or anything like that.
Could it be that because we redirected the carpentry traffic, that it thinks "well maybe I should just rank for carpentry"?...
We don't want to undo the 301 because it is the companys website, and we even through the trouble of cleaning up old content and moved over everything accordingly. We ended up with over 140 manually created 301s
Any ideas/suggestions?
Thank you
-
Was the old site manually or algorithmically penalized? As making a 301 from a penalized site to a clean site will most likely forward the penalty to the new site.
If is wasn't, then my next question is why are you doing a 301 redirect from a Website that isn't in the same exact industry nor is the same Website? As that could lead to another penalty called backdoor pages, which is using other sites (not related or not entirely related) to gain more traffic on your site.
I'd suggest you undo the 301 and see what happens. It could take a couple weeks to see the results of the 301 removal.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Too many 301 Redirects caused lower rankings :(
1. Ok so I code my eCommerce site myself first 2. Then switched to Shopify and re-direct all my URLs (terrible mistake) 3. Then Shopify didn't do in terms of seo, so I switched to BigCommerce and re-direct all my URLs (Yes I know but at least this platform is much better) I started getting 404 errors as you can imagine in webmaster tools after switching from Shopify and there were 504 of them. Why its too many because I realized that Shopfiy just creates so many urls for the same pages. One by one I re-direct them to their new destinations. As you can imagine my rankings dropped. As my site speed is now 5.5s at gmetrix. mobile 47 - desktop 80 on Google Site speed tool. Looking at the links now, some of the 404's does not make sense to redirect. How should I approach this? Should I remove some of them if they were not used on web anywhere, no sites linking to that page and let them die in time? OR Should I keep them all? I am giving some examples below, there are so many for each. Thank you all! /account/login/ /blog/?page=7 blog/tagged/recipe /blogs/news /blogs/news?page=6 /collections/all/category-name /collections/frontpage/category-name /collections/frontpage/products/product-name /collections/shop/category-name /collections/shop/products/product-name /product-name/ /pages/terms-privacy /pages/frontpage /products/product-name /shop/products/product-name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mounayoga0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Site's disappearnce in web rankings
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au. Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report. A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords. Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect. Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time?
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time? Would it make a difference in terms of ranking the site? Interested in your thoughts. Thanks! BBuck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
301 from one site to another
I have two e-commerce websites and i'm going to remove some products from website as requested by a supplier and sell them only on one site. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect the pages from site 1 to site 2?? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
BIG CHANGE - 301 Main site to new domain
Hi Guys, Were wondering what to do about our main domain name, we were ranking quite high for our main keyword and before Christmas our site dropped to 10th and we have been there for a while - last week our site dropped again onto the second page. The worrying thing is now our main domain name is now ranking 1 place above another domain name that we don't really use but its an exact match domain name for our target keyword. This exact match domain has hardly any links pointing to it and it currently has a 22 domain authority. We are wondering if we 301 our main site to this exact match domain would it rank higher than the top of the 2nd page where we are now for our main domain. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW1 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0
