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
-
Site dropped from SERP
Hello, I've been ranking a site for the last 5 months with good success, ranking on the first page for a high traffic keyword. In the beginning of September however, my site completely dropped out of the SERPs for several of those keywords yet my site was still indexed and there was no penalty applied to my site via search console. I would assume this maybe because of the update during the time.My site came back again a week later and it was ranking much higher on the first page (#2). Today, I just checked the SERPs and my site is now gone again. It was there this morning but now as of two hours ago it is gone, as well as one of my main competitors. My site is still indexed and no penalties via search console. Does anyone know what causes these types of issues? Im assuming my site will come back in a week or so with hopefully the same or better ranking, but when I have disruptions like this it really hurts my organic traffic. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Mobile site backlinks?
Hello, Our mobile site redirects to desktop in a desktop browser and vice versa; however, they are different sites. This said, shouldn't the backlinks for our mobile site be the same as for our desktop site since one redirects to the other. We show no backlinks in my analysis? Any help or insight would be extremely appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, I have a m.site.com version of my original site. It is about 1/10 the size, and no matter what I do-I can't get the site to rank. I've added more pages and specified canonical etc etc. Should I add as many pages as my larger site has? Are there specific places I should be submitting this version beyond the typical? I am at a loss, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! L
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Site Ranking Ahead of Us - Why?
I don't want to give details, but a competitor's site ranks ahead of us by a spot or 2 for some of our major keywords, and we can't figure out why. We have more content indexed, we have better content (my opinion), we're better optimized, we have significantly better MozRank and Majestic rankings, we have more links, we have better links. They have a plain Jane Wordpress blog, and their pages don't even have 300 characters. They don't have any awesome links. There are plenty of other sites besides ours that should outrank them. When I am using the various tools at my disposal, I can see why a competitor outranks us. I'm not obsessing, but this one, I just don't understand. Has anyone had this experience?
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Is Over use of Twitter to link back to your website affect google rankings
Having a debate here that needs to be settled. A friend is using twitter to link back to his site but is falling down the google rankings. I think that he is over using and creating double content which looks like a robot . Can any body elsse explain this Better Please Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
What has to be changed to improve rank?
What has to be changed to improve rank? We had "hip hop jewelry" keyword for a while, position 4. All of the sudden it dropped for position 6 and never went back. We did some on page optimization and got couple of links here and there... but so far we still at position 6. Please suggest us what has to be done?
Technical SEO | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0