SEO website migration gone wrong - noticed too late?
-
I have just been contacted by a company whose website has lost nearly all of its traffic.
The web developers appeared to know nothing about the SEO aspects, when it came to migrating the website (this website change took place first week of August) - the traffic has gone from 7,000 sessions to 200 sessions a month.
I can work through the usual SEO migration steps to help recover performance, yet normally I get employed on this kind of project as soon as the traffic loss is noticed... this time the traffic loss kicked in nearly 2 months ago - what are the implications of such a time lag re: SEO recovery?
-
Thanks for your helpful answers - much appreciated
-
Luke, generally speaking, the others are right--you'll want to get going as quickly as possible to recover the lost traffic. Most likely they didn't set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, and that's what I would concentrate on first. I'd recommend looking at Google Search Console's crawl errors.
If you can get ahold of the site's log files and analyze the site's 404 errors for traffic, then you'll want to set up 301 redirects for pages that have traffic coming to them first.
You'll also want to crawl the site and look for site issues, as most likely someone who didn't know to migrate a site properly may have missed major SEO-related issues when they built the site.
Finally, looking at the site's links and which pages those links are pointing to will be helpful, as that may "save" some link juice. If you can, get some of those links changed or updated so they point directly to the new page and not to a page that redirects.
-
Agree, it totally depends on what's up with the website. It may be more or less work, but unless they caused a google penalization for changing their website (ex. unwanted cloaking) it should be a matter of fixing the broken stuff.
Most likely google lost the track of their backlinks and without proper 301 redirection (which may have been sent all to the homepage is not helpgin them recover).
I would recommend try get access to their GWT first so you can assess how doable is the work for you. You can make a preventive analysis at no cost which will help you understand the timeline and weight every single action you'll need to take, and how much are your clients able to support you.
-
In my experience fixing all technical issues, making sure all redirects are properly in place and doing some link building then the site should recover well, even 2-3 months later. I rinse through and through on the technical side.
The issues start coming to the fore when content is killed, keywords are changed, directory structure is changed. You know how it goes.
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
-
SEO rank down after Magento migration
Since November we migrated our shop from Magento 1 to 2 and our organic traffic has dropped by 50%. We still haven't figured out the cause (or a solution). Are there more Magento users who have the same issue? Charlotte (www.dochorse.nl)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocHorse0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Linking to External Websites?
Is it good to link external websites from every page. Since, the on-page grader shows there should be one link pointing to an external source. I have a website that can point to an external website from every page using the brand name of the specific site like deal sites do have. Is it worth having external link on every page, of-course with a no-follow tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Migration Challenge Question
I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands. Right now we have two website, lets call them: www.parentcompanyalpha.com www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com. Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com. But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off. So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com. So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched). Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com. What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible? The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score. I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go? I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com? Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
The SEO effect of adding a front page to a website?
I have a client that wants to add a front page to a website so that when a user visitors the site for the first time a full page advert/message/page appears before they enter the site. The client wants this to be cookie controlled so they only see this on the first visit to the website. I am concerned that even if I put links to a sitemap or xml sitemap on this page that it will affect how well the site performs in search engines. Any ideas/suggestions or experiences? I found an interesting page on Quora about using pop ups.... Anyone who comments can you link to some good research and a clear simple explanation I can use to explain to the client why this is a bad idea..... https://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/How-would-a-pop-up-ad-on-a-websites-home-page-affect-SEO And for the record I tried the usability argument....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
I can't help but think something is wrong with my SEO
So we re-launched our site about a month ago, and ever since we've seen a dramatic drop in search results (probably due to some errors that were made) when changing servers and permalink structure. But, I can't help but think something else is at play here. When we write something, I can check 24 hours later, and if I copy the Title verbatim, but we don't always show up in SERPs. In fact, I looked at a post today, and the meta description showing is not the same, but when I check the source code, it's right. What shows up in Google: http://d.pr/i/jGJg What's actually in the source code: http://d.pr/i/p4s8 Why is this happening? Website is The Tech Block
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Adwords Policy and SEO
I have a customer who runs campaigns on adwords and we have had real problems with his ads being taken down due to certain ingredients being present in supplements. Now we move towards his SEO campaign and we wondered if the natural listings are effected by sites that list banned substances or pages listed on the adwords policy as being banned ? Has anyone experienced a site being downgraded by link being present from sites that provided products or services that are banned from being advertised on Google adwords ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0