I have rebuilt a website on a new domain and followed SEO protocol to maintain authority, but the results and rankings are declining.
-
We took over an account for a company called knightdoorservices.com who specialize in doors and windows in Edmonton, Alberta. We built them a new website on a new domain: knightdoorsandwindows.com. We did 301 redirects on all of the old URLs so that they now point to the new URLs so most of the authority should transfer over. Additionally, each page has a properly optimized title, h1 tag, a series of pertinent alt tags, and many instances of the focus keyword for that particular page. Additionally, the website loads quickly and has many high authority inbound links pointing to the domain. We have done this for many other companies and have seen their rankings maintain their position or increase. Is there something that I am missing for this company in particular? Thanks so much!
-
Thank you for sharing your expertise. It's greatly appreciated!
-
Thanks for this advice!
-
I have a few thoughts.
First, the new site's homepage has very little content above the fold.
Next, in ahrefs I'm only seeing 1 followed link and that's from a kind of low quality directory.
I see that you are ranking for some terms such as "front doors edmonton" but it is inner pages, not your home page that are ranking. Those pages don't have the full page slider and have some text above the fold, so that's probably what I'd try to change first on the home page.
Have you done a fetch and render as googlebot on the home page?
-
A separate project should be undertaken to change the url from knightdoorservices.com to knightdoorsandwindows.com for all the old backlinks that have been acquired so far.
301 redirects only pass on some of the link equity. So it's very important that you fix the website url in those backlinks
By doing this, you should see some improvements soon.
-
You are a good man, Dmitri. I appreciate your expertise. So basically, just don't worry, trust the process, and make sure the backlinks are actually working! Thanks!
-
Hi there.
Well, rankings drop (at least for some time) is pretty much unavoidable when changing domain name.
Now, you are saying that there are lots of high authority backlinks to that domain - i check and ahrefs tells me there are only 12(!) backlinks alltogether and MOZ OSE says there are none at all. Well, here is your problem!
I checked backlink profile for old domain and yes, there is a decent backlink proile, so that's why there is a drop. Just give it some time and build some fresh backlinks.
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
-
Relaunching a website - SEO implicataions
Im looking to relaunch a current website, that will undergo a complete makeover. Can you you tell me what factors I need to consider in doing this, particularly with regards to maintaining seo and migrating the current site in general
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aplnzmarch180 -
Competitors ranking with multiple sub-domains with no backlinks
Hi Moz, We are currently doing SEO for a hand therapy company called the Hand Therapy Group. They rank well, however, one competitor, Sydney Hand Therapy, is ranking higher than them for the term "hand therapy Sydney" (which is one of our highly focused keywords) with three different URLs (their home page, contact page and about page) despite the latter two pages have no backlinks. I understand why Google might see their homepage as being more relevant because their name is Sydney Hand Therapy (even though the Hand Therapy Group have more backlinks) but why do the other two URLs rank so well? Any help/info/advice would be brilliant! Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Rankings drop from the new update
Hello, I've noticed some big ranking downs on important keywords, from the last Google update, and don't really know what seams to be the problem, but have an assumption. In April 2015 we had 3.000.000 pages indexed by Google, and 80% of them had duplicated content for about 90% of it. The site I'm talking about is http://nobelcom.com/. The duplicated content came from variations between calling from and calling to selections, because each of this selection was making a new url (ex. nobelcom.com/caling from/calling to). If "calling from" and calling to were the same country the url was nobelcom.com/calling-from, but after you chosen another calling to, the url become like the one in the example. To solve this I've decided to keep the nobelcom.com/calling-from urls and for different calling to country to display the content trough a javascript, because it was the same, it changed only the country names and the rates. I thought that this change will help us with the duplicate content, and still deliver our client what they are interested in, without affecting the UX, and also reducing the link juice dilution because we had 3.000.000 indexed by Google and most of them with no added value Can this be the reason for the drops? Now we have 590.000 pages indexed by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu1 -
301 process, migration to new domain
Hi all! We have an old site wordpress based, with great ranking and PR 7, called www.europe-internship.com which is going to be migrated into our new Django site www.eurasmus.com (specifically eurasmus.com/en/europe-internships)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
The new one is a much more advanced version that we will keep developing. We have been migrating the information already but we are planning to apply the 301s in the next weeks to start passing the SEO value to our new site and traffic. We have all the url structures and everything checked and technically we are ready for it.
Therefore, we are almost ready. I have 2 questions: The new site includes more services, like accommodation, information...not only internships. Therefore, should we point the most relevant urls from our previous site to our home to share the value or just to the internships section? I am afraid that if the bounce rate goes higher from the 301 we could loose some value... 2)Should we point all the urls at the same time to the new site? Home, vacancies, blog pages, etc... or start gradually doing it to see how it goes till we make it to all the pages including the home? The old site still makes some money and I am not sure how quick will be to pass the SEO value, so in the way we may loose few thousand euros...We understand that, but we want to check what would be the best in your opinion. Let me know what you think and your opinion! Thank you in advance!0 -
Redirecting Domain / Maintaining Keyword Ranking
Right now we have two sites: "our-company.com" and "cool-widgets.com." We rank high for "cool widgets" searches due to our keyword-friendly URL, but we're merging everything into our newly-redesigned company site. Should we redirect the old "cool-widgets.com" homepage to "our-company.com" (to directly transfer the old PR and links), or would it be more prudent to redirect the old homepage to "our-company.com/cool-widgets" to keep the "cool widgets" keyword in the URL? This option seems like it would be good for maintaining organic search results, but it wouldn't pass the strong link backbone to the new site's homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | versare0 -
Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThisisPlanB0 -
Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL
Hi! OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz but have been self-teaching for 3 years. However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years. I just purchased www.shopadorn.com Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah I guess I am stuck. Not sure what to tell my web designer to do? Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs? I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings? Where should I start?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shopadorn0