Migrated site back in April and rankings have not returned.
-
I sure hope someone can help me with this. Back in April I migrated my site and did a website redesign. We implemented all the 301 redirect page for page. I lost about 40% of traffic. My main key word is baby headbands that goes to our home page. www.princessbowtique.com We were ranking at number two and have fallen down to number 9 and 10 and have recently come back up to number 8. My question is and I am wondering if there is something wrong with my HTML Code, or something else. All other pages stay lost some rankings but not as much a my home page. This home page is what gets most of my traffic and we are really hurting. I've had to let go of my employees and it's looking really bad for our business. Anyhow I'm trying to figure out what I can do it improve. I migrated to Big Commerce and they did all the 301 redirects. All catagories stayed the same url but the product pages did have 301 redirects.
-
My questions were just the tip of what could be wrong. As I said and Moosa repeated, you are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are way too many factors at play on why you may have lost some organic lately. Competitor improvements, your own site not crawling properly, parameters & duplicate content confusing Google, new site structure loads slower, etc.
There aren't another 3-5 questions we can ask to sort this unfortunately. Someone needs to dig in with your site, analytics, etc. to see what's going on. Exact dates matter (algorithm updates) as do how everything is setup for your redirects and all that. As I said, Archive.org saw your redirect as a 302. That could hurt you. There could just be so many reasons.
-
Also, we did alot of link building on the .net site and since October we have started building links again.
-
Thank you so much for all the input. We did a migration from the .net site back a few years ago. We did lost some traffic but it did resume with in a few months. I have been on the .com site for some time now. We did another migration back in April and that is when everything went down. From what I can tell, the home page did not change urls or the category pages. The product pages have 301 redirects. Also, in Goggle Webmaster tools there was alot of 404 erros ( fixed over 1,000) that show all these links that really were not even "real" links. This only happened when we change hosting companies. We are currently hosting with Big Commerce.
To answer the questions:
-
Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall? It was all organic,
-
What was your main source of traffic on the .net site? No, we migrated to the .com site in 2013 so it been some time.
-
Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them? No, all organic
-
Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile? No, not that I know of
-
Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc. How do I go about doing that?
-
-
I believe you really need someone who can do the site audit and tells you what areas of the website need more improvement. I run a screaming frog on your website and I can say that the migration was pretty much done right.
Obviously when you migrate and 301 pages from only to new domain, not all the juice pass to the new domain so loss of link juice can be one of the reason why you lost rankings for any of the key phrases.
You said you were ranking on 9 and 10 and recently moved to 8 and while I was checking your ranking on SEMRush.com it says “7” so seems like you are on your way back to your old position.
Here are the few things I would suggestion you should do.
- Hire a consultant to do the detailed audit and answer the important questions raised by Matt and few more important questions.
- As 301ing the pages result in a loss of a link juice to new pages so I will recommend building few good links pointing back to the different pages of the website.
- Also, update blog more often and see if you can engage target audience on your blog via social media and other relevant sources.
- Also make sure your site speed, page load time, server connectivity and uptime is up to the mart as this can be a reason.
Hope this helps.
-
Ah, glazed right by it.
-
www.princessbowtique.com, redirected from .net
-
You are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are a lot of factors at play:
-
Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall?
-
What was your main source of traffic on the .net site?
-
Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them?
-
Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile?
-
Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc.
Things like domain age, 301s not passing 100% of benefit, etc. will be affecting you but there could be other factors. It's very difficult to diagnose such a problem like this. Your old site had been online since 2008. That's a good amount of site age.
Also, back in September, Archive.org (Wayback Machine) found that your redirect was actually setup as a 302.
When I do a manual crawl myself or header check I see that it's setup as 301 but whatever sent them a 302 may have also been passed onto Google. I would want to check the WMT/Search Console for your site, Analytics and then maybe you'd be a lot closer to having an answer.
Hope that helps some.
-
-
Hi Tiffiny!
Are you able to share the URL for your site? It'd be helpful to be able to take a look.
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
-
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
I am having an issue with my rankings
I am having an issue with my rankings. I am not sure if there are issues with onpage dup content or with the way wordpress is behaving but there is no reason based upon the sites back link profile that the site shouldn't be ranking well. The site is mesocare.org. If anyone can help it would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | weitzluxenberg0 -
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net0 -
My rank suddenly drop
Hi before i subscribe for MOZ i have hired a seo expert to do an optimization for my escort website, it was really hard since im not knowledgeable and have no clue about it also my niche is kinda hard as what everyone says. The SEO did a good job ranking my site but in less than 2 weeks my ranking goes down and every time it happen what i do is call him and tell him about the situation and in just few days my rank goes up again and im in page 1 of google. My question is, is that normal? like ranking drop in less than 2 weeks and he could easily rank me up in just few days? I pay just to make sure that im on page 1, so every time he put my site on page 1 i pay for it. Gawd i still have no clue whats going on, i have a lot to learn, black hat, white hat, proper back linking, etc etc so i'd really love to know if its normal cause if it is then no point for me to learn SEO as he is doing job well done. I was just afraid that he is doing this to rip me, not that i dont trust him but you know this days everyone needs something for a living 🙂
Technical SEO | | geefex6nsy0 -
How long does it take for rank to return after 301?
Hello all -- just looking for those who have implemented site-wide 301 redirects due to a domain change. I am about 2 weeks into mine and am seeing minimum 5, maximum 21 spot drops in many of my targeted terms. My pages have strong GPR, with most being 3 or higher. Anyone out there been able to track a ballpark of when rank will return? The 301 redirects were implemented correctly, with 1 to 1 setups in most cases. Google has updated the listings with the new domain name, but I'm taking a huge rank hit. Any experience on how long I can expect (I know it's different for every situation) would be great! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
Ranking with a .nu TLD
Hi everyone, A few weeks ago i purchased a .nu TLD, it's a really nice domainname but i'm wondering if it's possible to rank with this domain in Google? I've heard several times that it doesn't matter for Google which TLD a site has, but i normally never see .nu's high in the SERP's, what are your opinions about this? Is it possible for me to get this site high in google with good links and quality content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | iwebdevnl0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0