Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
-
Hello...
We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history.
Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure.
Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts?
Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does.
Thanks!
-
Hi I noticed a dip in traffic after my last relaunch as well but it got back to normal within 2 weeks. I can recommend doing a search in google with site:yoursite.tld to check which sites are listed. Make a Excel Sheet from that and check if you have done all the 301 properly.
-
This happens sometime and that is why I always encourage people to plan everything on paper when re-launching your website from old to the new version as one mistake can kill your rankings and traffic like anything.
As per my experience, I don’t see any big problem in your case as after re-launching the dip in traffic I s normal and the only way you can get the rankings back is by continuously creating new content and getting quality links back to the website.
As far as the URL in GWT is concern, there could be few URLs that you have missed (or they might not be the part of the website but system generated somehow in the past) the best idea in my option is to create a custom 404 page and take all the URLs that are not redirecting to any relevant page should go to this 404 page. I believe this way this particular problem will not occur again.
Hope this 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
-
Best wordpress plugin for redirects, Old to new pages
What is the best wordpress plugin for redirects, Old to new pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard1 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?
We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Should discontinued crusty old products (but still new stock) be listed on site?
Some may think this is not good to do for us, because it tarnishes the image of the site as being: "These guys are pawing off old stuff and not carrying up to date products. It would be a waste of our time to try to sell it off of our site." ... even though 89% of are items are new and up to date products. (My feelings on this would be the opposite: I want all the old crusty stuff up there because it makes it available to a much bigger market area.... called "The World". lol! To me, if it's not moving in our market, it means we bought the wrong item for our market and we need to offer it up to "The World". Maybe I'm way off here, but are there any other spins on thoughts on this? ) Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Using a 302 re-direct from http://www to https://www to secure customer data
My website sends Customers from a http://www.mysite.com/features page to a https://www.mysite.com/register page which is an account sign-up form using a 302 re-direct. Any page that collects customer data has an authenticated SSL certificate to protect any data on the site. Is this 302 the most appropriate way of doing this as the weekly crawl picks it up as being bad practise? Is there a better alternative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ubique0 -
Can I, in Google's good graces, check for Googlebot to turn on/off tracking parameters in URLs?
Basically, we use a number of parameters in our URLs for event tracking. Google could be crawling an infinite number of these URLs. I'm already using the canonical tag to point at the non-tracking versions of those URLs....that doesn't stop the crawling tho. I want to know if I can do conditional 301s or just detect the user agent as a way to know when to NOT append those parameters. Just trying to follow their guidelines about allowing bots to crawl w/out things like sessionID...but they don't tell you HOW to do this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenShafer0