301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
-
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated
This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?!
I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone.
I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!?
Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/
Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/
If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
-
Hi Dirk
My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.
I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.
Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.
-
Dan,
I do agree with you that design is a ranking factor - but it can only be indirect. Google is unable to judge if the quality of the design is good or bad. The only way it can judge this is by analysing the behaviour of the visitors on the site. Nechemia did indicate however that after migration user engagement improved rather than decreased.
Dirk
-
Hi There
I think the issue is the design. Believe it or not, this is likely a ranking factor. I've seen the opposite - a site will get a new design and rankings will improve.
I think in your case, being totally honest - the old design was much better. Here's some issues I see with the new design that make it hard for me as a user to enjoy using the site.
- The top menu text (home, about us...) blends almost complete in with the background - you can barely read it (at least I can barely read it)
- You breadcrumbs sit way off to the left --> http://screencast.com/t/rsGKJ8cZc -- they are not within a container or anything, which makes it look odd.
- A shotcode is showing up in the content --> http://screencast.com/t/AoaexaPcL -- [get_laughing_image]
- The old site links out to facebook, twitter, RSS etc much more prominently - on the new site it's hard to find those buttons at all.
- So many of the jokes, especially with dialog, don't even have line breaks - it makes it incredibly difficult to read --> http://screencast.com/t/7udxq536
I'm sure we could find more, but the point is that I think the old design was better.
Have you tried the old design on the new domain?
-
Just to mention, the site: searches are very artificial and the rankings for those searches does not have much meaning or hold any clues about how Google views the site.
-
That's so nice of you to ask
Unfortunately no! I even took out the whole front page (and just made it into the latest posts) which had almost all of the customizations, and still nothing doing. My traffic now is down to 1560 a day (from around 13,000) and only 117 of them are from google.
I just can't imagine what the issue can possibly be. I mean if the issue doesn't have to do with 301 (because it went down when I changed to this design even when it was still under greatcleanjokes.com) and it doesn't have to do with the customizations of the front page (because that's gone) what can the issue possibly be??!
Any ideas?
-
Hi Nechemia! Did any of the suggestions resolve your issue? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
ok I think I will. Maybe I'll just wait a day to see if any of the suggestions worked.
Thanks again!
-
Summarising (this thread is becoming extremely long):
- redirects seem to be implement as they should
- user engagement seems to be improved after migration
Performance seems to be & has been an issue - with unresponsive scripts & pages which are loading quite slow. Quality of HTML is (was) quite lousy.
I would stick to my original advice - and ask an HTML / CSS guru to have a look at your code, clean it & implement some of the performance improvements that were already mentioned before (to reduce the time to first byte). One thing you could already correct in the code is the location of an embedded javascript - it should be in the body or head - currently one script is outside the HTML tag.
Good luck
Dirk
-
Yes the page views did increase a bit.
-
Small update - if I compare the results of both old & new site - the order of the results seems identical (don't know if the order of the results was different before migration)
-
Hi,
I did a site:www.greatcleanjokes.com/ and sampled a few of the url's - all of them seem to redirect to the appropriate page on the new site. To be sure - I tested a few of them with web-sniffer.org, and it returned a proper 301 status. The cached version of the results is also showing the version of the new site.
A site:chokeonajoke.com returned slightly more results (probably new content you added) - so on first sight not really an issue
To be honest - I don't think the problem is related to the redirect. You could double check - download the 1000 most popular pages from the old site & crawl these using Screaming Frog to see if the redirects are ok (you can do this in the free version - no need to buy the licence if you use list mode).
Did the number of pageviews/visit decrease or increase after migration. Longer time on page is normally a good sign, could also indicate however that people struggle to find the info they are looking for (which I doubt is the case on your site)
rgds,
Dirk
-
Thanks again for your response!
In google analytics the new site was doing better, ie. more time per page,
I still think it's weird that when you search for site:chokeonajoke.com not one subcategory shows up until page 35, just a couple of main categories show up, but mostly what shows up is post pages. Why would the post pages out rank the subcategory pages?
I'm also wondering if it is ok to use hostmonster's dashboard to redirect or if I should be doing it myself using .htacess file. The only reason I'm asking is because no search engine seems to be picking up on the 301
-
I would highly recommend this guide if you are looking to speed up your site (I note it is wordpress):
https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/
-
Nechemia,
The problem was not a 404, but a technical issue coming from your plugins, css, etc. Now, after checking again things seem working much better. As Dirk said, you only have to wait for rankings coming back but its not necessary to go back to the old page.... Make sure you clean and optimize your code in order to have your rankings back sooner.
And please, remember to click on "I like this" if you are happy with all our answers and help, and please select an answer like the Good Answer to close this Q&A.
Regards,
Luis
-
If performance decreased dramatically between the old & the new site it can have a very strong impact on search results. You're in a competitive area, and most of the jokes published on your site also exist on other sites, so the content is not really unique. It's difficult to say post-launch if it is the only reason why your site dropped. I assume you redirected all the old pages to the new one & did a change of domain in WMT?
Did you see changes in google analytics (like increased bounce rate, lower time on page, ...) the moment you changed the site?
Page speed improved - but Time to first byte is still quite high. You might want to check out this article on how to optimise your WP site: http://www.webpagetest.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=13520
rgds,
Dirk
-
Thanks Luis,
DO you think that was a problem because of the 404? Or are you basing it on something else?
-
Thank you so much for your detailed answer.
I really appreciate you taking the time to look at it.
I deleted quite a few plugins and the speed definitely picked up quite a bit.
You are right that there is a lot of java script and css (I guess that's what happens when u hire a foreigner from odesk
Although it's hard to believe that that will completely knock me off the serps
I guess I'll wait a few days and see if picking up the speed makes a difference.
Thanks again!
-
Of course! But the problem is that I was even unable to load the page 1 of one category. Now surprisingly I am able to load them normally, and the good point is I think I found the problem. You have a plugin called "all sub categories" that you should check (maybe upgrade it, or remove it and reinstall it) since I think is causing all your issues.
Let's be clear. If your pages are slow, or have some technical issues.... this affect your rankings, and of course your traffic (SEO is balance of a well-structured site, good content, social, user experience and linkbuilding....you need all of these things working well to avoid losing your rankings
This is now no more a SEO problem, but a Wordpress plugin problem.
Hope to have been helpful !!!
Luis
-
Well yeah every category has a few pages so pages 2, 3 ect. are all noindexed but that shouldn't effect traffic to the 1st page in the category.
-
The crawler is telling me that you have 122 pages blocked. Please check this:
-
Meta robots tag (same thing...), but this time not from your wordpress admin panel. Now you go to a category page (whichever), and check the source code and copy-paste it here.
-
Check your .htaccess file too in order to see if there's any blocking point out there (you can copy-paste it here too).
A question....are you able to load your category pages? I mean, if you go here http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/ everything is OK??? Because I really can't access it!
List of the pages blocked for crawlers :
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/cute-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/relationship-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/short-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/marriage-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/best-joke-contest/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/work-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/knock-knock-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/10/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/pet-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/funny-sayings/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/husband-wife-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/little-johnny-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/witty-one-liners/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/religious-humor/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/clever-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/men-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/lawyer-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/old-people-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/wife-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/cute-quotes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/10/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/relationship-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-puns/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-videos/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/old-people-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/cheesy-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/text-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/food-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/death-humor/death-joke/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/marriage-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-videos/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/6/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/10/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/laffy-taffy-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/best-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/women-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/short-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-thoughts/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/funny-insults/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/pet-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/blonde-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/latest-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/6/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/men-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/11/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/one-liners/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/doctor-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/husband-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/13/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/cute-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/one-liners/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/3/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/8/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/4/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/10/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/women-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/school-jokes/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-riddles/page/2/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/5/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/16/
http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/drunk-jokes/page/2/
-
-
Good try
But no I just checked and the box is unchecked.
Any other ideas?
-
Hello Nechemia,
Please, do the following:
- Login at your wordpress
- Left menu > SEO > Titles & Metas > Taxonomies
- Please check the status of the Meta Robots for categories.
Luis
-
Hey there
You're going to get a lot of self promotion potentially here from members.
I recommend looking at Moz's recommended list here: http://moz.com/community/recommended
-
Hello Nechemia,
I was checking at your sitemaps. I couldn't enter any category page in your site, but I had no problem with posts & pages.
I think the source of all your problems is right there at the categories level (no SEO problem!), I'm crawling your site right now. I will come up with the results in 20 minutes with some more info, but yeah probably you have a problem at your wordpress settings.
Hope this helps!
Luis
-
Hi,
There seem to be some technical issues with your site:
-
site speed - even though the webpagetest result is not that bad - every page I visited on your site seemed to load very slow (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150423_8J_1E1E/). Screaming Frog indicate that 30% of your pages needs more than 3 sec's to load (and Screaming Frog is normally very soft in judging site speed)
-
Google insights for speed: again the score is not great but not really bad either - but if you see the number of blocking .js & .css files it's a bit terrifying (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fbest-jokes%2Fgood-jokes%2F&tab=mobile)
-
most pages call a css file that doesn't exist: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-content/plugins/all-sub-categories/catstyle.css?ver=4.1.2
-
on some pages example http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/best-jokes/good-jokes/ (same for /jokes/death-humor) I was unable to load them in Chrome - in Firefox I got the message: non-responsive script: Script: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-con…/jquery-2.1.3.min.js?ver=2.1.3:2. Checking w3c validator indicates line 1627, Column 8: Stray start tag script. (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fdeath-humor%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0)
-
6% of your content is >10 clicks from the homepage
If I were you I'd hire a good css/html/js programmer & ask him to clean your code. For a rather simple site you seem to use an awful lot of javascript. Cleaning the code & working on performance will probably solve most of the problems. It can take sometime however before you regain your initial search traffic.
rgds,
Dirk
-
-
Thanks for responding. 1. Yes I did submit a sitemap 2. The reason I went back and forth is because the traffic kept going down, so I switched back before it would cause long term damage. That wasn't the cause of the issue, that was in response to the issue, you understand?
Do you have anyone who you would recommend that I hire to look at it?
-
Hi there
Do you update your sitemap, correct all internal links, and upload said sitemap to your Webmaster Tools?
Try that method if you haven't already. Otherwise, I would hold off on changing your domain often. 3 seems like a lot!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Do Google Penalties Always Follow a Redirects to New Domains?
I have a couple sites that were penalized by Google for hosting content that made Google look bad. After a major newspaper showcased what was going on they suddenly took a major hit as if someone at Google flipped a switch and told their system not to rank the content for anything other than their brand names. The article made Google look bad because the newspaper highlighted a lot of unverified user generated accusations the reporters assumed not to be true in the context of "these accusations are mostly false, but they still show up on the first page when people search Google." I was thinking one way to fight this would simply be to host the content at a different domain, but I am concerned about the new domain being penalized as well. I don't want to completely shut down all of the original sites because some of them have brand recognition. The oldest domain is 12 years old with backlinks from several news outlets which is why the content ranked so well, but after the penalty that is only the case on Bing. I've read various articles about this tactic. Some say that you will almost always pass the penalty to the new domain if you do a 301 redirect, but the penalties at issue in those articles were for things like buying links or other black hat tactics. This is somewhat different in that I wasn't doing anything black hat, they just decided not to let the site rank for political reasons. I was hoping that maybe that type of penalty wouldn't follow it, but right now I am leaning towards simply creating a second site to syndicate articles. It will need to attribute the articles to their sources though, so they will need either no followed links or possibly a redirection script that bots cannot follow. I would really like it if I could simply change the first site to its .net or .org equivalent and 301 everything though.
Technical SEO | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Why don't sites using Drupal have keywords
Why don't the vast majority of sites using Drupal list keywords in the head section? Is there another convention used in Drupal that serves the same purpose for SEO? I noticed most of the Drupal info pages about keywords seem to drop off around 2010
Technical SEO | | fxarechiga0 -
My wepgages aren't crawled by google
Most of my webpages aren't crawled by google.
Technical SEO | | Poutokas
Why is that and what can i do to make google index at least most of my webpages?0 -
Migrating to New site keywords question
We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question: in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.
Technical SEO | | ssaltman0 -
Redirect old URL's from referring sites?
Hi I have just came across some URL's from the previous web designer and the site structure has now changed. There are some links on the web however that are still pointing at the old deep weblinks. Without having to contact each site it there a way to automatically sort the links from the old structure www.mydomain.com/show/english/index.aspx to just www.mydomain.com Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Canonical tags pointing at old URLs that have been 301'd
I have a site which has various white label sites with the same content on each. I have canonical tags on the white label sites pointing to the main site. I have changed some URLs on the main site and 301'd the previous URL to the new ones. Is it ok to have the canonicals pointing to the old URLs that now have a 301 redirect on them.
Technical SEO | | BeattieGroup0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850