Major Website Migration Recovery Ideas?

[Neil-MyDestination]

Since starting our business back in 2006 we've gone through alot of branding, and as a result URL and architectual migrations. This has always something that has been driven by usability, brand awareness and technical efficiency reasons, while knowing that there would be SEO hits to take from it....but ultimately hoping to have a much stronger foundation from an SEO perspective in the long run.

Having just gone through our most recent (and hopefully final) migration, we are now about 15% down on traffic (although more like  35% - 40% in real terms when seasonality is stripped out). Below is a timeline to our structural history:

2007 - 2009 = We operated as a network of inidividual websites which started as 1, www.marbellainfo.com, but grew to 40, with the likes of www.thealgarveinfo.com, www.mymallorcainfo.com, www.mytenerifeinfo.com, www.mymaltainfo.com etc..

2009 - 2010 = We decided to consolitdate everything onto 1 single domain, using a sub-domain structure. We used the domain www.mydestinationinfo.com and the subdomains http://marbella.mydestinationinfo.com, http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com etc.. All old pages were 301 redirected to like for like pages on the new subdomains. We took a 70% drop in traffic and SERPS disappeared for over 6 months. After 9 months we had recovered back to traffic levels and similar rankings to what we had pre-migration. Using this new URL structure, we expanded to 100 destinations and therefore 100 sub-domains.

2011 = In April 2011, having not learnt our lesson from before :(, we undwent another migration. We had secured the domain name www.mydestination.com and had developed a whole new logo and branding. With 100 sub-domains we underwent a migration to the new URL and used a sub-directory folder. So this time www.myalgarveinfo.com had gone to <a></a>http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com and was now www.mydestination.com/algarve. No content or designs were changed, and again we 301 re-directed pages to like for like pages and with this we even made efforts to ask those linking to us to update their links to use our new URL's.

The problem: The situation we fine ourselves in now is no where near as bad as what happend with our migration in 2009/2010, however, we are still down on traffic and SERPS and it's now been 3 months since the migration.  One thing we had identified was that our re-directs where going through a chain of re-directs, rather than pointing straight to the final urls (something which has just been rectified).

I fear that our constant changing of URL's has meant we have lost out in terms of the passing over of link juice from all the old URL's and loss of trust with Google for changing so much. Throughout this period we have grown the content on our site by almost 2x - 3x each year and now have around 100,000 quality pages of unique content (which is produced by locals on the ground in each destination).

I'm hoping that someone in the SEOmoz Community might have some ideas on things we may have slipped up on, or ways in which we can try and recover a little faster and actually get some growth, as opposed to working hard and waiting a while just for another recovery.

Thanks

Neil

[Neil-MyDestination]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your reply. It's certainly been an interesting couple of years, the fact is we've only really been able to sustain it thanks to the fact that I think our content and offering to the visitors of our site is that strong.

The internal linking structure of the site is something we have been thinking to look at. The problem from our perspective is we think all the links we provide on the page are of value and use to a website visitor. With this in mind, we are not overly keen on removing any of them from the page, so what else is available to us to do, in order to make it easier for search engines?

Thanks

Neil

[JoeAmadon]

Neil, after reading through your situation, I think it is remarkable that you've been able to sustain these changes as you have. I think you could make a remarkable case study out of this.

Taking care of the 301 redirect chains is definitely a good step. Other things to consider include the Panda update, but looking at your content, it looks really solid. I considered the Google's ever growing preference for big brands, which could be playing an effect, but it looks like you've done everything you can on the site to signal a legitimate brand.

When I started looking a little closer at the site, it seems like the word "travel" has almost intentionally been avoided. I actually like that you don't overuse the term, but possible using the term a little more could help signal to search engines the types of search queries that you are relevant for.

Another on site enhancement I'd suggest is re-examining the site's navigation and internal linking structure. For instance, the SEOmoz analysis tool shows almost 5000 internal links on the homepage. When I look at the source code, I don't see nearly that many. But you might want to look into how search engine bots are crawling the mega dropdowns to make sure your internal link juice is flowing to the pages you want it to.

Unfortunately, I can't offer much more advice than that. While I don't think search engines are going to be distrustful of your site for the moves, the 301s still lose some link juice. And I'm a believer that SERPs are somewhat self-reinforcing (i.e. getting good rankings will make it easier for you to get more natural backlinks as you're getting more traffic), so time spent in search engine oblivion is always going to be tough to come back from.

Best of luck.