Domain Change
-
What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain?
We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT.
This traffic drop seems excessive...
-
Hi David, yes, we moved from site.com to site.org.
We are running off WP and have the SEO plugin activated which has a rel=canonical feature. Pages on new site have canonical tags pointing to the new .org page. So no, we're not pointing back to the old .com pages.We fixed the duplicate content issue so just need to wait and see if that helps. It's been over a month and old site still showing up in index when I use directive site:mysite.com. I also submitted change site address in search console.
-
Yeah, having several thousand new pages on the new site would not be helping.
Just to clarify, you moved to a new domain and a completely new website at the same time?
The new URLs that have been created don't have a canonical tag pointing back to the original URL?
You should be able to setup a htaccess rewrite rule to sort this out quickly but I can't make any recommendations on exactly what to use because I don't know how your site is setup and how it all works (ie. if for some reason it needs index.php URLs with query strings in some areas).
-
Hi David, thanks for the feedback. It's been over 17 days so there probably is something going on with the site. As I mentioned in my reply above, we discovered that each article had been creating duplicate content (URL with parameters). I noticed several thousand more pages on the new site than the old site. Do you think this could be the root cause?
-
Hi Omar,
I recently went through a domain change on one of my own sites and saw similar decreases in traffic.
The site changed from http://www.oldsite.com to https://newsite.com
I know that my changeover was 100% flawless in terms of precautions and things that were implemented to prevent/minimize traffic loss, but I still saw a 50-70% decrease (this was also a Google News site - which had to be resubmitted after the domain change).
I posted a thread on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum to see if anyone else knew why there was such a decrease in traffic and was surprised to have a few people contact me privately saying they were/are going through the same thing.
My site took 17 days before seeing a sudden jump in traffic and it continued a steady growth over the following 4 weeks. 17 days was around the same time frame it took for the others to see their traffic pick up.
Provided you've done everything correctly with the site migration, my advice is "hang in there" (which I know is hard)! It shouldn't be long before you start to see things pick up again!
Cheers,
David
-
2 weeks ago. Just found out that each article was creating additional URLs with parameters appended to existing articles. Here's an example of additional URLs created:
site.com/original-article this article linked to:site.com/original-article/index.php?id=488923
This happened on every article on the site and we have thousands of articles.
I'm assuming we're getting dinged for all the extra URLs Google had to crawl? I saw a large spike in WMT post launch for pages crawled but that number has come down possibly because Google got tire of indexing all the bloat we had. Think that could be the problem? Articles on the site definitely aren't ranking as well so seems to be some type of algorithmic penalty.
-
We had a similar project few months ago, but from a .com to a .com
The website gain all possions over just few weeks, with an increase in rankings due to improvements to the on-page SEO.
maybe these blogs can help (both mention also updating your sitemap):
-
Hi Omar,
You really shouldn't see that much, but any drop should only be temporary. How long ago did you make the change? 50% does seem on the high side - I would expect a temporary drop of around 15% but have seen higher.
Did you update your sitemap as well?
-Andy
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
-
Changing site URL structure
Hey everybody, I'm looking for a bit of advice. A few weeks ago Google sent me an email saying all pages with any text input on them need to switch to https for those pages. This is no problem, I was slowly switching the site to https anyway using a 301 redirect. However, my site also has a language subfolder in the url, mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/ru/ etc. Due to poor work on my part the translations of the site haven't been updated in a long time and lots of the pages are in english even on the russian version etc. So I'm thinking of just removing this url structure and just having mysite.com My plan is to 301 all requests to https and remove the language subfolder in the url at the same time. So far the https switching hasn't changed my rankings. Am I more at risk of losing my rankings by doing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ruhol0 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
SEO implications when changing the business function however using the same domain name
Hi Everyone, Request some advice on the following situation please: If a client wishes to start a new business (advertising agency) using a domain name that they previously used for a completely different business function (selling hats & t-shirts) Is there anything you can do to "clean" the domain so that the previous indexing of the domain does not effect the new business and give the client a fresh start. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards and thanks.
Technical SEO | | Republica0 -
Tool to Generate All the URLs on a Domain
Hi all, I've been using xml-sitemaps.com for a while to generate a list of all the URLs that exist on a domain. However, this tool only works for websites with under 500 URLs on a domain. The paid tool doesn't offer what we are looking for either. I'm hoping someone can help with a recommendation. We're looking for a tool that can: Crawl, and list, all the indexed URLs on a domain, including .pdf and .doc files (ideally in a .xls or .txt file) Crawl multiple domains with unlimited URLs (we have 5 websites with 500+ URLs on them) Seems pretty simple, but we haven't been able to find something that isn't tailored toward management of a single domain or that can crawl a huge volume of content.
Technical SEO | | timfrick0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Should I change my host
Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Switch domain from one account to another at domain registrar
We need to move our domain from one account to another at our domain registrar (which is Moniker). Both the "from" account and "to" account will be at Moniker. The "from" account currently has privacy settings enabled and we'd also put these in place for the "to" account. Has anyone done this and see any impact on SEO? Is there any big or common mistakes that I should be aware of? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0 -
Question about domain redirects
One of my clients has an odd domain redirect situation. See if you can get your head round this: Domain A is set-up as a domain alias of Domain B Entering domain A or domain B takes you to default.asp on domain B. The default.asp includes VB script to check the HTTP_HOST variable. It checks whether the main doman name for domain A is present in the HTTP_HOST and if so redirects it to domain A/sub-folder/index.htm. If not present it redirects to domain B/index.htm. In both cases the redirect uses a response.Redirect clause. I think what is trying to be achieved is to redirect requests to Domain A to a sub-folder of Domain B. It works but seems extremely convoluted. Can anyone see problems with this set-up? Will link juice be lost along the redirect paths?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110