Image ranking plummet help

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Moz Community,

I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached).

We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know.

Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear.

Thanks,
-Reed

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[IceIcebaby]

Haha yeah I tend to get OCD on a lot of things. Awesome, thanks for taking the time to get back to me on this. I have learned to love the Moz community these days.

And that's a good answer, that's what I was hoping, but I guess anytime I see a traffic dip I immediately panic rather than take into mind what you just said.

Thanks again,

-Reed

[Bryan_Loconto]

Nice work moving over to the "hyphen" as opposed to the "underscore", being that the big G doesn't recognize underscores as a space.

I also agree with cleaning up the URL's to not have the .jsp extension. That could just be my OCD kicking in lol

If you are able to create a script to do all that heavy lifting, certainly the best approach.

To answer your question: IMO I would think the combination of all the changes the site went through has cause Google's algo to be in shock when it crawls your site. Give it time, continue cleaning it up and I think you will recover just fine. If anything, I think you will be better than you were before the move as a result of your house cleaning.

[IceIcebaby]

Hey Ryan, I actually have another question if you wouldn't mind helping out.

Before our migration, our old team was creating all URLS with underscores as separators and ending in .jsp. I changed this to not have .jsp and to only use "-" as word separators in URLs.

However, we have a lot of backlinks with content linking to those .jsp URLs (and our old blog posts all link to those pages), which are 404 product pages. (I can redirect, but there are thousands of them). I could probably develop a script to automatically rewrite too.

My question: could this be a contributing factor to our organic downfall too?

[Bryan_Loconto]

The struggle is REAL ha haa I feel your pain brother. Get some good quality blog articles out and share them on your social platforms. That may help push the new data and get it circulating.Wishing all the best!

[IceIcebaby]

Thanks for helping out Bryan and Donford, it's been about a month and a half since migration so I'll definitely wait it out another month, implement some good marketing/content and see what it looks like after that.

Ahh, the waiting game of organic traffic.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Yeah, if a new IP was assigned to the site that is more than likely the cause of the dip. It should recover though, just needs time to propagate. Certainly wish you all the best with this! Keep us posted

[donford]

Hi ICEReed,

If you received a new IP, than I am fairly certain that is the issue. DNS has to propagate across the net before traffic returns to normal. I have had a few experiences with this, and have seen it take up to 3 months before traffic was returned to normal.

[IceIcebaby]

Thanks for responding Bryan,

I have referenced the tips in the website migration guide, but it's never a bad move to go over them one more time.

A new ip address was assigned to the site when we migrated.

I initially had a lot of indexing issues that are now fixed, but were a problem at the start of the migration. For instance, our sitemap.xml just vanished as did our robots.txt file. They are back up and running, but the dev team didn't migrate them over.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey Reed!

We experienced a similar dip for a site when migrating to a new server back in September 2013. Did you reference the tips listed in the post from Moz? Website Migration Guide

Its unfortunate that you made a few tweaks at the same time, which makes this more difficult to pin down.

When you migrated, did you carry over the original ip address or was a new one assigned to the site?