Complex URL Migration

[activenz]

Hi There,

I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas.

They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform.

Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either.

I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place.

We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea.

Question 1

Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic?

The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were:

1. We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand.
2. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them.
3. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company.
4. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months.
5. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases).

The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause.

Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated.

Question 2

We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking).

To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed.

This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago).

In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery.

Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all).

Question 3

The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame?

A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers.

Kind Regards
Conrad

[willcritchlow]

Hi Conrad,

What a tricky situation. Ultimately, these kinds of issues are hard to call perfectly because it's never pure search considerations in play and, especially with each business being different, it's impossible to be certain how search engines will treat you.

With those caveats in mind, here are my thoughts:

Question 1

Your thinking is solid. Whether it is the right call or not is impossible to know (even in hindsight) because there are simply too many moving parts. Nonetheless, I think you have sensibly weighed up the pros and cons and made the decision with open eyes. Just for completeness, I believe that point #2 is only a small benefit if at all (and probably declining) but the only part I'd really challenge you on is #3. I would personally only go down this route if the company truly is a specialist in each destination. If that is true, then great (and they likely have specialist country managers who can push forward the marketing of each site). If it's not really true and you're more just "seeking the perception" that it's true, then I might stick with the benefits of an integrated site.

Question 2

Errant 404s are a nasty and annoying problem precisely because errors do not necessarily undo quickly. I would be prepared to wait 6-8 weeks to see a recovery. You need to bear in mind, of course, that the drop could be associated with the downsides you identified in #1 (lower aggregate domain authority etc) and so you may not see a recovery from the 404s specifically. If you haven't seen a recovery after 8-10 weeks, I'd believe this was the "new normal" and would be looking at growth from there rather than "recovery".

Question 3

It's impossible to be sure. The number of "reversed migrations" that any of us have seen is tiny and they're all different so I'm afraid that your guess is as good as mine. If it turns out that improvement isn't on the horizon, then I might be tempted but I think that my approach would be to stick with the decision if you think it's the right one - see my comments in answer to q1 above. I'd change (back) only if you think benefits you expected haven't come to pass (e.g. Has conversion rate increased on dedicated sites versus how it was on an integrated one?) and the balance of benefit has shifted.

I hope that helps.