New Website SEO Implications
-
Hi Moz Community,
A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'.
The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics.
Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4.
New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool).
Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing?
My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet.
That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome.
Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done:
complete 301 redirect list
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc)Extra info:
Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250)Thanks in advance
-
Thank you so much for the extremely long and detailed response.
Here's an example URL: https://www.bodycatalyst.com.au/technology/cryolipolysis-fat-freezing
The /technology/ sub folder is new. This target page now doesn't have a link from the homepage which I suspect is a critical factor.
-
The joy of the new site eh. Sometimes no matter what you do this can't be helped and is just temporary. You've completely changed your site framework and URL structures so it may take a little time for Google to trust the site again.
But firstly, some blatantly obvious things like.
- check robots.txt file for unintended blocks
- check some of your main pages' canonical tags to ensure they are matching the real URL
- check for nofollow & noindex tags in the source code on some of the main pages
- check your country and language targeting hasn't changed in your hreflang="en-us" tags
- check you haven't accidentally changed the country targeting in Webmaster tools
- check a whole bunch of your old URLs to double check the redirect chain. Use a tool like https://httpstatus.io/ and paste in a bunch of them
- check your htaccess file for some kind of accidental googlebot block ( RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^googlebot [NC,OR] ) (some devs use this)
- check if any old trusted schema markup been completely taken out
As far as content length goes, I wouldn't worry about that as long as it is good content - but that also depends what niche your site is in and whether or not content length is a factor.
But you say, you have added an extra folder to your URLs. This is usually worse. Was your old URL:
example.com/clean-short.html - and now you have
example.com/useless-folder/another-one/now-long-full-keyword-here.html - This URL structure would hurt your rankings no matter what you do.If you have changed all of the following it will be a bumpy ride:
- your URL structure and the keywords in it
- your main title tag
- the content of your H1 & H2 tags
Share your URL if you want some further advice as someone may see something very obvious that you've overlooked, but without seeing the live site it makes it harder to help.
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
-
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Can I use the old website content on the new website, after deleting it from the server?
My website nowwhatstudio.com hit by google pure spam and google applied manual spam action to the website. I create new website (nowwhatmoments.com) with the same content from the old spam action website (nowwhatstudio.com). As google removed my old website content from search indexed. Can I use the same content for a new website? If I delete my old website from the server, after that Can I use the old website content for a new website? Or Can make edits the old website content and make it 80% original for a new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Magento SEO firm
I'm looking for an SEO company that has substantial experience with the Magento shopping cart system. I've gone thru MOZ.com's Recommended List but I'm unsure of who specializes in Magento. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UncleXYZ0 -
Website/SEO Audit Needed
We've been outsourcing our link building to India for the past 3 years and the results were pretty good up until beginning of this year. What they were essentially doing is putting links into directories, a few per month, and posting a few articles per month. Out of our top 10 keywords, 8 got into top 10. Then something happened around Jan 1 last year, our ranking started dropping, falling out of the top 50, before settling around 20-30ish. We disavowed most of the low quality links since then. Also, very odd, all the top ranking competitors all fell (including me) and were replaced by less "specialized" companies who sold a broad range of products (for example: all parts of the car, rather than someone who just focused on mufflers). Theres also other differences but again I can't put a finger on it. I'd like to find someone who can do a detailed audit of our site, and our competitors, what happened to cause the drop, and why the new top positions sites are ranked high. And I really don't have time to do an audit myself. Our site is American Hospitality Furniture dot com. Any feed back would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AHH8880 -
Geotargeting SEO
Hi, We are and SEO company based in Scotland and have taken on a project where the client works in the UK but has distribution in mainland Europe and the US. He currently is working off 3 websites targeted at each area Uk, US and Mainland Europe We are going to rebuild one site and have each area on the site, however we are unsure if sub folders or sub domains would work better. My personal opinion is that sub domains would be better, but I dont have information to back this Can anyone advise? Any advice on geotargeting SEO also would be appreciated! Many Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trickcreative0 -
New website strategy concerning Google Spider
Hello, I have a question concerning a new website. What should I do, SEO wise? Should I place all my content on my pages at once? And thus let the spider crawl everything at once? Or should I place my content in different phases? So the spider could crawl my pages multiple times in some days/weeks time? Or do both ways come to the same result? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarikeP0