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.
-
One more detail of note
The old site still shows in google site: search, two full years after everything is 301'ed.
Change of address was not used - is that critical to ensure that PR passes?
If so - it doesnt allow redirecting into a subfolder - what do you recommend in this cases - temporarily change our 301 to point to newsite.com instead of newsite.com/subfolder in able to get past this blocker in the GSC change of address tool?
"The old site redirects to newsite.com/xxxx, which does not correspond to the new site you chose."
-
Hi David, I will shoot you a PM, I think thats best. Thanks for your offer.
-
Hi Sonar,
Sorry to hear about your migration troubles!
I don't think you will find generic advice too helpful, but I'd be happy to take a quick look to see what's going on and possibly give you some specific recommendations.
Are you able to share the domains with me in this thread or through PM?
Cheers,
David
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
-
Using same copy on different domain
I have a client that currently has a .com domain (not using hreflang) . They have a new partner in the UK and they want to replicate the website and use a .co.uk domain. It will be a different brand name. Will this cause any SEO issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Is an iframe redirect on the same Domain bad for SEO
Good morning. We have a vendor that has created a landing page with content that we want to use. Because of the way we built the site, the only way to use the content is to create an i-frame. The i-frame is re-directingon the same Domain. Would we benefit from the SEO Content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdenbo_edf0 -
Page Authority inherited by domain
Hi there, We (blog.fust.ch) created our blog at the same time as (blog.interdiscount.ch). We're both blogs of big brands in switzerland. But there is one big different. The interdiscount blog ranks much better than we do. But they not even optimize the blog for standard SEO points. Now i found the reason i guess. They get the complete page authority of the brand interdiscount.ch inherited. How is that possible, because we don't..? (Screens in attachment) Best regards Sandro K7zxz ndODO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandro_Haag0 -
301 process, migration to new domain
Hi all! We have an old site wordpress based, with great ranking and PR 7, called www.europe-internship.com which is going to be migrated into our new Django site www.eurasmus.com (specifically eurasmus.com/en/europe-internships)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
The new one is a much more advanced version that we will keep developing. We have been migrating the information already but we are planning to apply the 301s in the next weeks to start passing the SEO value to our new site and traffic. We have all the url structures and everything checked and technically we are ready for it.
Therefore, we are almost ready. I have 2 questions: The new site includes more services, like accommodation, information...not only internships. Therefore, should we point the most relevant urls from our previous site to our home to share the value or just to the internships section? I am afraid that if the bounce rate goes higher from the 301 we could loose some value... 2)Should we point all the urls at the same time to the new site? Home, vacancies, blog pages, etc... or start gradually doing it to see how it goes till we make it to all the pages including the home? The old site still makes some money and I am not sure how quick will be to pass the SEO value, so in the way we may loose few thousand euros...We understand that, but we want to check what would be the best in your opinion. Let me know what you think and your opinion! Thank you in advance!0 -
301 redirect to multiple domain
Hi guys, I have a domain A, B and C. The domain A was an association of two business and they are about to split. Parts of domain A are going to be redirect to domain B, but some content belong to the domain C. So my question : Is it possible to 301 redirect some pages from A to B and some other pages from A to C and if yes, what would be the impact on SEO ? Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevePatenaude0 -
International Domain and URL Method of Preference
I'm seeing varied opinions and methods preferred for domain/URL structure on international websites. A specific example we have now is an international brand in Asia, USA, Brazil/South America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. Their current domains are all fragmented across the brand and our goal is to have them unified, examples of their issue here; country.brand.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cuker
www.brand.com.au
www.brand.co.nz What I'm looking for is an approach that will have the best long term impact but no short term losses as well. I'm leaning toward www.brand.com.eu or www.brand.com/eu/ Looking at SERP's for other countries, subdomain geographic segmenting doesn't seem to show on any first pages in the SERPs. There is one other option I'm still interested in finding out more about, geographically segmenting sites and pages through canonical or hreflang. Interested in hearing some additional POV's. Thanks! Anthony0 -
Domain Favoured by Google
Hi there, We have just launched our website in Ireland .ie and was wondering would the .ie website be favoured by Google over a competitor with a .co.uk or .com domain? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780