New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
-
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site.
My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all?
The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map.
Any help would be gladly received.
Thanks
James
-
It can take a while, sometimes up to a few months. Google doesn't work fast, and it looks like you have already resubmitted the sitemap and fetched the pages. When we launched our new site, we saw a drop for a month, then we started to come back. Now after 6 months, we are higher than we ever were.
"Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages"
Agreed.
Was the new site launched on the same domain?
-
If you want to DM me a few more details I'll take a quick look. Did you make any significant changes... hosting/domain/CMS? Have you compared speed of updated site to old one?
-
Thanks for your response, most of the urls remained the same and the small amount that weren't were 301'd correctly.
The things we are noticing are some less optimal anchors and the HTML site map missing but the XML site map correct.
I will look into the possibility of toxic links but I think this is less likely as there are not too many links and it seems a massive coincidence that it happened 3 days after the site update, but who knows!
-
Thanks for the article, the old site has been restored but the rankings have not come back after 3 days, would you have expected them to be back now?
-
Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages. I can't imagine the new site having enough technical issues or things wrong with on page optimization to cause the drop. It is also interesting timing, as the latest Penguin update happened recently, so the new site may not be the problem at all, but instead could be toxic links.
-
This is very useful when you're managing a migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos - without specific details I can't advise on other issues...
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
-
Site Has Not Recovered (Still!) from Penguin
Hello, I have a site that just keeps getting hit with a ton of bad, unnatural backlinks due to the sins from previous SEO companies they've hired. About every quarter, I have to add more bad links to their disavow file... still. Is it time to move them to a new domain? Perhaps a .net? If so, do we just completely trash the old domain & not redirect it? I've never had a client like this in the past but they still want to maintain their branded name. Thanks for your feedback!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinaMumm0 -
Multiple 301 redirects and old site content appearing in Google results
I have found that for some Google searches the old version of the site on a completely different domain is appearing on page one of the results, while the newer site is only on page 3. The old site is redirecting to the new site with a 301 redirect, however there is also an additional redirect on the new site to force SSL. Despite this when you view the Google cache of the result that appears in Google the content of the page is still the old site. Is this normal or is Google not following the chain of 301 redirects? Edit: I just found out that downloading the page by right clicking a link and clicking download rather than viewing it in a browser leads to the old site appearing and the 301 redirect not being followed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freshleafmedia0 -
HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
Hi all, An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide. The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing. The following has been done; Everything 301'd from http to https Sitemap Edited Updated Webmaster Tools Robots.txt edited Crawled and Fetched all pages daily. Checked Paged are all follow,index. PPC Ads mass updated to new url's. Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google. HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content. Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done? I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You K9gB7hz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
Hi All, My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it. Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up. Any help would be good right now. Thanks in advance, Catherine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | caherinechan0 -
Essential items to consider when starting a new site in terms of SEO?
I've just launched a new site and have undertaken the following: Keyword friendly page titles Meta description Not a great deal of content on the site yet - but have a blog which we're trying to update as much as we can Analytics and Webmaster tools set up Dmoz submission Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page Google places set-up - waiting for postal pin I've signed up to here to help me to start building a link profile. However, would like to hear any more hints, tips or help on items I should be doing for a new site looking to move up rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | savageseo0 -
Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
Hi, I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained. Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
First eCommerce site, any tips on how to increase rankings would be appreciated.
As I mentioned I'm working on a new eCommerce site and just want some hints and tip on how I can potentially get the most out of ranking it. http://fuchia.co.uk/ I've meta titled / tag most of the products with relevant keywords, we have a good social standing so far with growth on Twitter + facebook but conversions are currently low or only coming through the website's eBay store (that has no connection on the site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAndy0 -
On Page Rankings dropped without any changes
What could have factored into some of my key words dropping from an A to a C on my on page rankings. I am not sure how it happened because there were not any chages made. Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0