Site Rollback for Careless Website Design That Caused Rank Drop
-
New PPC Client (out of necessity) had their site redesigned for mobile without much care given to it by a "SEO Expert". None of the meta data was copied over to the new images and pages, much of the old content was simply deleted, intra site links completely changed.
Huge hits in organic rank, resulting in traffic declines occurred as their lead volume hit zero the following month (April 21 until Present).
Any concerns I should have in doing a simple rollback beyond redirects and GWT (Search Console) ops?
Current plan is
1. Setup redirects back to old site
2. Launch PPC campaign to recover call volume and leads.
3. Optimize old site for mobile simultaneously with simple responsive framework for menu, text.
4. Start disavowing poor-quality links that were added (got 10 with spam rating >4).
5. Eventually move them back to Wordpress and the theme they paid for with site content, meta data, etc all in tact.
-
Did you look up the site in https://archive.org/ ? you should be able to recover lots of the content that was deleted!
Its even possible that some was curated across the web as well, if you need some help looking let me know.
-
No, I cant see any concerns. If re-directing should be no issue with duplication. Sounds like a good plan. Shame about the content deletion hopefully there is a back up.
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
-
I want my website to rank on the first page for a very competitive keyword
I am a WordPress designer and can service national clients. I want to rank on the first page for the keyword WordPress designer. This is a highly competitive keyword MOZ gives it a 68% difficulty. I rank locally in nj for WordPress designer nj and a multitude of local WordPress based key words. I rank on page 10 of serps doing a private browsing session. Some of my national competitors rank on the first page with not many links in. How could i be so low on the serps for the base keyword WordPress Designer but for local WordPress designer nj be number 1 everytime? What should be my best plan of attack if i want to Rank much higher for this one specific keyword hopefully page 1. I think this one keyword could increase business greatly so it is a top priority for me. I appreciate all advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Pages are being dropped from index after a few days - AngularJS site serving "_escaped_fragment_"
My URL is: https://plentific.com/ Hi guys, About us: We are running an AngularJS SPA for property search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emre.kazan
Being an SPA and an entirely JavaScript application has proven to be an SEO nightmare, as you can imagine.
We are currently implementing the approach and serving an "escaped_fragment" version using PhantomJS.
Unfortunately, pre-rendering of the pages takes some time and even worse, on separate occasions the pre-rendering fails and the page appears to be empty. The problem: When I manually submit pages to Google, using the Fetch as Google tool, they get indexed and actually rank quite well for a few days and after that they just get dropped from the index.
Not getting lower in the rankings but totally dropped.
Even the Google cache returns a 404. The question: 1.) Could this be because of the whole serving an "escaped_fragment" version to the bots? (have in mind it is identical to the user visible one)? or 2.) Could this be because we are using an API to get our results leads to be considered "duplicate content" and that's why? And shouldn't this just result in lowering the SERP position instead of a drop? and 3.) Could this be a technical problem with us serving the content, or just Google does not trust sites served this way? Thank you very much! Pavel Velinov
SEO at Plentific.com1 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!
Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time. It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1. DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31. It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2. The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized? And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking. I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a. There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b. For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not. If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn1 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000 -
High Ranking Site with tons of junk on the server
Hey All, So to make a long story short, we own a site that has been passed through many hand and many strategies. We are in the financial field and rank high for many relevant search terms. My job is now to audit/optimize and purge out site of the garbage that has collected over the years (since 2002). During the audit I have found many issues, fized them, but I am not sure own how to proceed with the follwing issues. Any advice to solve the following would be greatly appreciated! 9932 orphan files - does just removing them affect my SEO.. I like a clean house, can I somehow use them to my benefit? Hundreds of 404s with many external "follow" links that we are no longer getting juice from 8 Sitelinks in webmaster tools, but only 4 show in our search I am straight n00b so sorry if this is 101 for anyone you but your input would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0