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
-
Setting up analytics for a website redesign
Hey all, so in the past when I make changes to a site, I make the changes, review the analytics in the wake of the changes, analyze and go from there. Little things here and there, no biggie. With my new company, we're doing a full website redesign from scratch (Currently on Wordpress, moving to custom). They are asking me about analytics and reporting and I was hoping to get some insight here. When the new site is ready, they are launching it at www2.ourdomain.com and sending 25% of traffic to ourdomain.com to that with the other 75% going to www.ourdomain.com (current site). So two questions- how would you go about setting up analytics for that? And how do you ensure the www2 version doesn't get indexed but stay in Google's good graces? If you de-index your "home page" that 25% are seeing I can't imagine that's helpful for SEO. Hopefully that makes sense! Trying to look at how to A/B test to ensure the new site is working and converting before pushing all traffic to it.
Web Design | | DanDeceuster0 -
Is there any proof that google can crawl PWA's correctly, yet
At the end of 2018 we rolled out our agency website as a PWA. At the time, Google used Chrome (41) headless to render our website. Although all sources announced at the time that it 'should work', we experienced the opposite. As a solution we implement the option for server side rendering, so that we did not experience any negative effects. We are over a year later. Does anyone have 'evidence' that Google can actually render and correctly interpret client side PWA's?
Web Design | | Erwin000 -
How to export Wordpress comments ONLY to a new domain
Hi Guys, We have a bit of situation here. We have a website (let's say it is www.oldsite.com) where we had more than 2000 posts. There arose a need whereby we had to move some 60-70 posts from this oldsite.com to another domain of ours (www.newsite.com). So, here is what we did: Move those 60-70 posts manually from oldsite.com to newsite.com Did a 301 redirect of each of those 60-70 posts from oldsite.com to newsite.com. Google has now started to rank the posts from the newsite.com for this. That's all good till now. Now, here comes the situation. We also want to move the comments from some of those posts of oldsite.com (some 10-12 posts out of those 60-70) to the respective posts of newsite.com. How do we do that? Do note that we are pretty comfortable with databases and to some extent PHP. Please help.
Web Design | | seocuppa0 -
SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do... MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have. If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them? Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
Web Design | | BrianGilmore
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff. EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.0 -
What's the best way to structure original vs aggregated content
We're working on a news site that has a mix of news wires such as Reuters and original opinion articles. Currently the site is setup with /world /sports etc categories with the news wire content. Now we want to add the original opinion content. Would it be better to start a new top /Opinion category and then have sub-categories for each Opinion/world, Opinion/sports subject? Or would it be better to simply add an opinion sub-category under the existing news categories, ie /world/opinion? I know Google requests that original content be in a separate directory to be considered for inclusion in Google news. Which would be better for that? Regarding link building, if the opinion sub-categories were under the top news categories, would the link juice be passed more directly than if we had a separate Opinion top category?
Web Design | | ScottDavis0 -
Do drop caps impact the search value of your content?
A client of mine wants to include drop caps at the start of the first paragraph on the page because they think it looks nice. I found some css techniques for implementing this using a span on the first character to enlarge the size of just that character. First word of the first paragraph. Are there any seo concerns I should have for adding drop caps?
Web Design | | fivelinesmedia0 -
Does File Compression software on a website benefit SEO?
Hi all. Should we be using File Compression software on our website files for SEO benefit? If so, do you like Deflate or gzip? Thank you for your help! Jay
Web Design | | theideapeople0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0