Migrated Domain, 90% Drop in Organic Traffic, HELP!!!!
-
One week ago we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to https://www.metro-manhattan.com/.
Our organic search traffic from Google has dropped about 90%. Is this normal? If so, how long should it take to recover?
We filed a submitted a domain change request on Webmaster tools one week ago. We are noticing that many of the www.nyc-officespace-leader.com pages are still indexed which seems strange after a week.
To complicate things, we filed a disavow file on April 9th for spammy links that pointed the NYC site. We filed the identical disavow of those links to the new Metro domain to ensure low quality links don't point to the new domain.
Prior to making the domain change request, we migrated 30-40 non critical pages from NYC to Metro domains. Webmaster Tools indicated that the traffic was normal on the migrated pages. We then migrated remaining pages and filed the domain change request on April 4th. It is after April 4th that traffic and ranking declined.
I would like to mention that there was no change in content; identical content was migrated from Metro to NYC
This does not seem normal. Research prior to the migration indicated that if proper steps were taken it should proceed with limited disruption in traffic and ranking.
Any ideas on how to remedy this situation?
Thanks, Alan
-
No this is ok. The old site will stay in the index for a few more weeks.
Can you identify if the missing traffic is all organic?
-
Hi Andrew:
I expected to take a hit, but I don't understand why the old domain remains indexed. Also, the extent of the drop in traffic. Is it abnormal that the old domain pages have not yet been removed 9 days after the move. Indexation for them dropped for a few days and then climbed. Is this a red flag for a fundamental problem? -
p.s. you've checked your google analytics installation?
-
Going HTTPS and a new domain name is quite a big change.
You will defiantly experience a drop in traffic but this should recover. But as you've changed domain names this could take 3 months.
A 90% drop is still big, but as your now averaging page 4 this is somewhat understandable.
-
Your average position used to be page 3. You're now averaging on page 4. This is part of the reason.
Have you lost a lot of referral traffic when you lost the backlinks.
Or is the traffic missing from organic?
Check analytics > acquisition > all traffic > channels
-
Exactly the same site.
Note that the only thing changes was the move to a new domain with an SSL certificate.
-
Is it basically the same site but with a different domain name?
i.e. all content / titles and meta descriptions the same?
-
Hi Andrew:
The redirects from all pages on the old URL redirect perfectly to the new domain. Any other ideas?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hello
Just to clarify this bit
"-Comprehensive redirects were done to the domain. Please see attached Search Console form for the permanent redirect. "
Is this the only redirect measure you have taken? (this is not sufficient)
You need to contact your domain name provider, online or on phone. Ask them to forward the old domain to the new domain.
If the new website structure is the same then all the URLs will connect up. Any that don't need redirects put in place done on the server of the new domain.
-
Hi Andrew:
Thanks for your response. Yes, something went terribly wrong!! Response to your questions:
-Comprehensive redirects were done to the domain. Please see attached Search Console form for the permanent redirect.
-The new domain is fully crawled.
-2 or 3 404s were detected. They are in the process of being fixed.
-As of April 10th, the average position of the old domain (NYC) was 28.2. As of April 10th average position of the new domain is 35.1.Real problem is the drop in clicks. New domain only got 5 or 6 yesterday. Normally, in March we would receive 80-90 visitors. Average position of the old domain in March was 26.8.
-I have attached several images showing the problem. One, labelled "Inconsistencies" shows some strange results. Indexation for the old domain dropped for a few days after the permanent redirect (301) but then climbed again. Seems very abnormal.
Another anomally: entering "site: www.metro-manhattan.com" does not bring up the URL in search results.
Any ideas or suggestions???????????????????
-
No this is not normal. Something is wrong.
Go into search console. Is your sitemap still running the old sitemap or has it been updated? Is the new domain fully crawled? If your site map is incorrect and 404ing this needs fixing.
Have you done comprehensive 301 redirects to the new domain? How many 404s do you have in search console? Have you used domain forwarding and resolved the urls at the new domain?
Also do you still have the search console with the old domain in it? Look at search analytics (in search traffic), what is your average position? compare to new domain - what is the average position for that. Have you had a big rankings drop? You must have, but this will show you the scale of the problem.
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
-
Huge Drop in Direct Traffic in G4
Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseninja1 -
Need some help understanding SEO - Please help before I lose [pull out] all my hair
I'm new to SEO, and am stubbornly trying to educate myself. I have a telescope shop in Canada, it's a small business that we run on the side. We're driving lots of traffic through FB and our outreach programs but I really want to increase our presence on search. We released a new website back in January and it killed some of our rankings. We're working our way back with a very specific set of efforts on regular SEO: Metadata and titles, although it seems that's not super relevant Building high quality backlinks and eliminating any spammy backlinks Rewriting product listings so that they are original content though I'm not sure how important this is in e-commerce Writing high quality articles and blog posts Working relevant keywords into our product pages and titles I understand that good SEO is about pushing on all the levers, and trying to make sure that your site is as valuable to the end user as possible. We're making some good progress, but I'm puzzled by the #1 shop in Canada. They don't put any apparent effort into SEO and they still rank #1 on every key product we compete with them on. I've worked with two separate, highly ranked and regarded SEO firms on this and neither has been able to tell my why this other site ranks so highly. Here's a specific example on a popular product that we both sell, the Celestron NexStar 8SE. Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069 Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the Telescopes Canada page. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page. But they keep ranking ahead of us, and right at the top of google search. Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). Our text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. According to Moz's page ranker it's 20 points higher than Telescope Canada's page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here. Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada I have a feeling it's something technical that I'm missing, but I'm not sure how obvious it is with two 'professional' firms not finding it. I'd really appreciate any help or insight that you can offer.0 -
Domain name in URL
Hi we are targeting local cities across the UK with landing pages for our website. We have built up a few links for https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/bristol/ and recently advised that I should change the URL to https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/marketing-agency-bristol/ and 301 directing the old one 2 questions really: 1. is there any benefit in doing this these days in that this is the main keyword target we have for this page? 2. Do I get 100% benefit for all the links built up on the old page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Botched domain migration
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic. All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then... Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic). Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over. Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really. Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished. Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sonar0 -
Domain Issue
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust. I have a few questions.... -Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy? Any guidelines on how to value domains? If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info? Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Massive drop in organic rankings - but strange issues
Hi guys, We experienced a massive drop in organic rankings on Saturday 29 October, a drop of around 80%.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
I have received no notifications in webmaster tools
The site still ranks for its name so we are not banned
The site has been around since 2007
My mozrank and trustrank are very high (higher than sites that now still rank while we don't)
The strange this is the homepage doesn't rank for the main keyword (which it always did), but now a deeper page ranks for the main keyword, albeit on page 4.
Quite a few of our sites were affected, even though they target different industries, different countries, with different hosts, different unique content, different links (for one we havent even started link building and it was getting 250 UV per day, and now 8). I am completely confused by this.
Any advice or direction would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much0 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0