Any second opinions as to why our organic search website traffic hasn't recovered from website rebrand (domain change, website redesign)?
-
I am hoping to see if anyone in the Moz community would be able to help troubleshoot or lend any advice on a major organic search traffic issue we've been experiencing over the last 8 months.
In a nutshell, we decided our ~4.5-year-old business needed to undergo a rebrand in October 2015. After changing domains & redesigning our website (more below), our search-driven sessions have dropped 20% in 2016 v.s. 2015. We made quite a few on-site modifications (with some success) post-redesign but are still deep in a rut and not sure what more we can do to recover.
I've listed my theories below as to why we're still suffering this hit. If anyone could weigh in on these and/or share any other troubleshooting ideas, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it (and owe you a lunch/beverage of your choice the next time I'm in your city!).
- ****Backlinks - despite our efforts to 301 all links, I sense we have lost many backlinks. According to Open Site Explorer, our old domain has 1,172 backlinks (some from some very authoritative pages domains), 1,068 of which are passing link equity. In contrast, our new domain has 367 backlinks, 321 are passing link equity, and very few overlap with our old domain.
- Domain Age - we may have lost much of our reputation with Google as our new domain is much younger than our old domain (1-year-old v.s. 5.5 years old).
- Domain Name - although I thought to have common keywords in one's domain was a myth, I am now questioning that belief. Our old domain contained a popular, topical keyword and our new domain is derived from a term that is topical, but very uncommon.
- New URLs - our developer has insisted all links were moved to the new domain, but I have a hunch they were not. When conducting a "site search" (i.e. "site:websitename.com"), the new domain returns 7,740 results. Prior to our switch, a site search with the old domain yielded 30,000+ results.
- 404s - we found and fixed 100-200 404'd links after the domain switch. We still see a few pop-up today and I'm wondering if this is a red flag in Google's eyes.
For a little more background too, here are the nitty gritty details with a rough timeline:
- Pre-October 12, 2015 - registered new domain and designed the new website on Wordpress, while researching a range of articles and resources for a successful site migration (e.g. this and this Moz guide).
- October 12, 2015 - flipped the switch on the website design, domain, minor content reorganization, and social handles. We announced the change to our audience via an article, newsletter, and social; informed Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) of the new address, 301'd all links from the old to the new domain, and submitted new sitemap in GWT.
- October 12 - 16, 2015 - traffic is normal, everything seems to be okay.
- October 17, 2015 - search traffic drops by 54% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand.
- October 26, 2015 - search traffic rises, so now only down by 30% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand.
- November/December 2015 - re-added numerous elements from the old website such as category, tag, and page pagination and a few sidebar modules that linked to other important pages and tags. Search traffic rises slightly in November (down 27% year-on-year), dips again in December (down 31% year-on-year).
- January 2016 - today (June 17, 2016) - we published more content on a daily basis and search traffic fluctuates around the 20% versus the same period in 2015.
- January 2016 - down 23% year-on-year
- February 2016 - down 17% year-on-year
- March 2016 - down 20% year-on-year
- April 2016 - down 21% year-on-year
- May 2016 - down 21% year-on-year
- June 2016 (until the 17th) - down 23% year-on-year
Thank you all in advance for your time and help, please let me know if you have any questions!
-
These are all great questions that I'll be sure to explore. Thanks again, Ruth! I really appreciate your time and help.
-
It's common for Screaming Frog and a Google search to return different numbers, but they should be much closer together than that. Which number is closer to your sense of how many URLs are actually on the site? When you look at the URLs that Screaming Frog returns, are there any that appear to be duplicate, or are otherwise not really there? Which URLs are appearing in a Screaming Frog crawl but not in the Google site: results? These will give you more information as to where Google is potentially having trouble indexing your site.
-
Hi Ruth!
Thank you very much for lending your help and the thoughtful questions. A Screaming Frog crawl reported 30K+ pages which is definitely higher than the 7,740 pages in Google's index. However, I recall that when I previously ran a Screaming Frog crawl of our old domain prior to the switch, it also reported a figure 3x-4x higher than what Google indicated. I am wondering if each bot/tool has a unique crawling method and if this type of discrepancy is just par for the course. What do you think?
Once we're out of this research phase, I'll definitely be diving deep into which pages were receiving the most organic traffic prior to the switch. It's a relief to hear I'm not alone in thinking backlinks may be contributing to this conundrum. Reaching out to those domains is definitely on our to-do and I'll be sure to keep your tips in mind when I do so!
Thanks again, Rush. I'll drop you a note when I'm next in OKC!
-
Hi Nick,
It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?
Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?
I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.
One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.
I hope some of that helps!
-
No problem at all
-
Billy - thank you as well, much appreciated! I totally understand how limiting it is to not have the old and new domains here, but as mentioned above to Ikkie, I'm worried about what may happen if this thread is found via SERPs by one of our advertisers or competitors.
If it's alright with you, I will PM you our new and old domain shortly.
Thanks again!
-
Thanks, Ikkie! Those are all very helpful points to bring up, please see below for my responses:
- On November 1st and 21st, our new domain received a message from Google via Webmaster Tools that they could not access the site (due to a server error). Otherwise, we have not received any other penalties.
- Yes, all of our highest-trafficked and most valuable pages are redirecting properly to new pages
- Based on our page views / session, we have no reason to believe the site experience (or journey) has been disrupted.
- We are not conducting any off-page activity or strategies at this time.
I did consider leaving our domain here, but I'm concerned about the effects of a competitor, advertiser, etc. finding this thread, mainly because we're an online media business that is widely searched. If you don't mind, I will PM you our old and new domain shortly.
Thank you very much again for your help. Beverages and lunch are on me when I am in London next
-
The vast majority of my clients are hotels. Because of this I deal with rebranding all of the time (a property switching brands, a branded property dropping the brand to become independent etc...) If you feel comfortable leaving your old and new domains I would be happy to take a look for you. As Ikkie said, it could be any number of things.
-
In my opinion drop could be due to many reason, Its hard to tell without having look into Search Console and Analytics of your account however based on what we see regularly, majorly what you need to check whether you have received any Google penalty on old site in the past. Is your all valuable pages from old site redirecting to the new pages. Are your users having good and smooth journey.
Are you conducting any off page activity?It would be handy if you can leave URL of your site.
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
-
Homepage Slider How to Handle H1 and H2's
Working on a site with a slider on the homepage, I dislike them but owner wants to keep in place. Currently, the slider has 4 slides with different images but the same text, so the slider has 4 slides with 4 identical H2 tags and accompanying text. There is no H1 tag on the page at all. It seems to me that a better solution would be to change the first slide to be H1 (with the target keyword) and rework the text in the other slides as H2 tags to appeal to the user. This does mean that the H1 and H2 tags in the slider would be styled the same. Is this a sensible approach?
Web Design | | GrouchyKids1 -
Best techniques for trying to rank a single page website?
I am new to SEO and am currently trying to market a single page website. Its proving to be hard. I have managed to get the site to page one for a few keywords and it is improving (upto page 2 for some desired keywords) but it seems to have stuck there for a few weeks now - with no movement. I am able to develop it if required. However I thought that I would just ask if there was anything that could give it a nudge without this? I have done on-site optimisation. As far as I'm aware that's about as good as it can be. So any advice?
Web Design | | Chstphrjohn0 -
Footer link back to developers domain
I have read a lot about where it is suggested to either not put an attribute link in the footer of a clients site or to no follow it. But I have a little bit different take on the question. How does this work on a large scale? Are these manual penalties, or are they automatic? By large scale, I am talking about big cms programs such as Wordpress, Joomla, and the likes of those. They all have links back to their site in the footer of the default templates. Is this bad? Does it not rally matter on the scale of companies such as this?
Web Design | | LesleyPaone0 -
Increasing content, adding rich snippets... and losing tremendous amounts of organic traffic. Help!
I know dramatic losses in organic traffic is a common occurrence, but having looked through the archives I'm not sure that there's a recent case that replicates my situation. I've been working to increase the content on my company's website and to advise it on online marketing practices. To that end, in the past four months, I've created about 20% more pages — most of which are very high quality blog posts; adopted some rich snippets (though not all that I would like to see at this point); improved and increased internal links within the site; removed some "suspicious" pages as id'd by Moz that had a lot of links on it (although the content was actually genuine navigation); and I've also begun to guest blog. All of the blog content I've written has been connected to my G+ account, including most of the guest blogging. And... our organic traffic is preciptiously declining. Across the board. I'm befuddled. I can see no warnings (redirects &c) that would explain this. We haven't changed the site structure much — I think the most invasive thing we did was optimize our title tags! So no URL changes, nothing. Obviously, we're all questioning all the work I've done. It just seems like we've sunk SO much energy into "doing the right thing" to no effect (this site was slammed before for its shady backlink buying — though not from any direct penalty, just as a result of the Penguin update). We noticed traffic taking a particular plunge at the beginning of June. Can anyone offer insights? Very much appreciated.
Web Design | | Novos_Jay0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
Internal links, new pages & Domain Authority
I have two questions regarding Domain Authority: 1. Is it possible that a drop in Domain Authority may have been caused by adding a blog and blog posts? In other words, would adding pages/posts dilute the site's authority? And will it catch back up with itself or will that require inbound links to those new pages? (oops! that was 3 questions in one) 2. Would it be detrimental to have internal links coming from blog posts without authority to my Home page and could that have contributed to a drop in Domain Authority? Thanks!
Web Design | | gfiedel0 -
Where should I spend Money on my website?
My website is www.capitolshine.com what do you think? Where should I spend money to enhance SEO search results? I do have a limited budget but the company is growing quickly and I might have more funds to invest in a few months. Where should I spend money now (less than $500 per month) and where should I spend money in the future? I am afraid the person who coded my website wasn't well versed on SEO. There also might be coding errors. I'm trying to work through the errors myself via the repots from SEOmoz.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
Recommended Website Monitoring Tools
Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
Web Design | | James77
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks0