Website Migration and SEO
-
Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly.
All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-
Thanks Jeff! Your response was very helpful. It is true that the old domain contained a competitive keyterm which was lost in the migration. The competition is also higher for that space so this explains why we took a hit in PageRank. I will be working on regaining that competitive edge in the coming months.
Thanks again!
- Sheena
-
Sheena -
Two out of three isn't bad
Without seeing the actual sites, my best guess is that the www.product.com is an strong domain name with exact match keywords. And when it was moved over to the brandname.com/product the new location didn't work as well as in the past.
301 Redirects transfer about 85% of the link value, according to the Moz blog article here:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects"When done properly, we know from testing and statements from Google that a 301 redirect passes somewhere around 85% of its original link equity."
According to an interview with Google's Matt Cutts: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021832.html
"Eric Enge: Let’s say you move from one domain to another and you write yourself a nice little statement that basically instructs the search engine and, any user agent on how to remap from one domain to the other. In a scenario like this, is there some loss in PageRank that can take place simply because the user who originally implemented a link to the site didn't link to it on the new domain?"
_ "Matt Cutts: That's a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301)."_
Perhaps the other two that are performing well are in a less competitive space; this one might be more competitive from other established players in the industry.
For the other two sites, taking a 15% hit probably didn't make a difference, but for the one site, it's likely that it did.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
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
-
If I have two brands and I market one in English (BrandA.com) and one in Spanish (BrandB.com), and the websites are identical but in different languages, would that have a negative impact on SEO due to duplicate content?
I have a client who wants a website in Spanish and one in English. Typically we would use a multi-language plugin for a single site (brandA.com/en or /es), but this client markets to their Spanish-speaking constituents under a different brand. So I am wondering if we have BrandA.com in English, and the exact same content in Spanish at BrandB.com if there will be negative SEO implications and/or if it will be recognized as duplicate content by search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Designworks-SJ1 -
How to carry across/capture linkjuice during an SEO site migration
Hi there - I am planning out an SEO migration but this thought just occured to me: If the links into a site's previous URL went to the non-canonical version of the domain name - e.g. to: https://theguardian.com/uk and not the correct version of that URL, which is: https://www.theguardian.com/uk Then, if I do a redirect simply from the correct canonical version of the domain:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
https://www.theguardian.com/uk - rather than the versions of the domain that are being pointed to by backlinks - e.g. https://theguardian.com/uk - then the migration will not be carrying across all the linkjuice from the previous site. So how would you suggest dealing with this issue?0 -
New Website SEO Implications
Hi Moz Community, A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'. The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics. Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4. New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool). Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing? My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet. That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome. Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done: complete 301 redirect list
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | I.AM.Strategist
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc) Extra info: Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Movil Migration
I have a question!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romaro
We are about to migrate from one version of mobile where we used a different desktop to a mobile version (non-adaptive) which has the same URL URL desktop. We must make a 302 redirect and remove the Canonical and linkages by code? That's the way to do migration?
Thank You !!0 -
Problem with SEO for my Image based website.
My website focuses on movie posters. I'm having a little debate on what is the best way to have images linked to. The current image location is stored like this: /movie-name/poster-1.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thedevilseeker
/movie-name/poster-2.jpg Is it best to leave it like that or change it to : /movie-name/movie-name-poster-1.jpg
/movie-name/movie-name-poster-1.jpg The reason I ask, is that I read today that Google uses the image name to help detect what the image is about. At the same time, if the movie name is the in folder structure, along with the image name... wouldn't it start to look like keyword stuffing?0 -
Blogs and E-Commerce websites
I have recently launched an e-commerce website which has a whopping domain authority of 1! I was thinking about adding a blog to it (it's in open cart), but that would mean creating it in a wordpress but using the same domain name. Would this be beneficial from an SEO stand point (i.e sending traffic to w blog that isn't actually on the e-commerce website itself) , or am I better off creating content as blogs/articles on other people sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
Unable to Crawl my Website
Hi all, I have a website that I am trying to promote, but tried to add it here in SEOMoz and got the following message: We have detected that the root domain evolving-networks.co.uk does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. Does anyone know why this website cannot be crawled? Please help. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LSDigital0 -
In-House SEO - Doubt about one SEO issue - Plz guys help over here =)
Hello, We wanna promote some of our software's. I will give u guys one example bellow: http://www.mediavideoconverter.de/pdf-to-epub-converter.html We also have this domain: http://pdftoepub.de/ How can we deal about the duplicate content, and also how can we improve the first domain product page. If I use the canonical and don't index the second domain and make a link to the first domain it will help anyway? or don't make any difference? keyword: pdf to epub , pdf to epub converter What u guys think about this technique ? Good / Bad ? Is there the second domain giving any value to the first domain page? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | augustos0