Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?

[eugene_p]

Hello,

We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently  invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com.

We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks.

Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl.

Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain?

Thanks,
Eugene

[DmitriiK]

Here we go again. The problems with technicalities...

Ok, here it is - 301 does NOT lose any link equity passed through it. It's known and that's what the linked post and tweets are talking about.

What me and @effectdigital are talking about is "downtime" after 301-redirecting from one domain to another. The value of domain IS affected.

If you would redirect a page from your own domain to another, on your own domain, sure, there wouldn't be any loss in link equity, but there would be loss in page authority for the new page. Think about it like this - google ranks a page, because it "knows and trusts" it. All of the sudden, that page is not there, and just sends google to another page. Google needs time to make sure that it's the same page, about the same stuff, with the same quality. It never takes away the link equity, but the "trust factor" is not there for a bit. When it happens within the same domain, Google understands that it could be simple content move or URL change. When it's cross-domain, the reasons could be much different. From hacking to selling the website etc. So that's why the rankings and usually traffic goes down, but, after Google realizes that it's all the same, and all good, they recover.

Hope this helps, and sorry for the confusion earlier.

[eugene_p]

Thanks for your responses Dmitrii Kustov and effectdigital, to restate the quoted information, our uderstanding was that there would be a downdraft period of at least several weeks, maybe longer, but that we would eventually recuperate our page rank. I had referenced somewhat recent articles stating that 30x redirect no longer dilute pagerank, whereas in the past there could be 10-15% dilution.

https://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608

effectdigital, to answer your questions:

1. Yes, the full site has moved to brandshop.com as of early last month
2. The new site is somewhat of a re-build but 95% the same in terms of pages and content. To clarify, the contents within brand.com/shop and brandshop.com are nearly the same
3. We have not shed a lot of content. Just a handful of products were disabled (in a catalog of thousands of products).
4. No, we did not benchmark rankings or put any attention into SEO for that matter. I came on board pretty late into the project, and without making excuses, my time was prioritized in other aspects of the business. We did not do a "one-size fits all" redirect, we mapped out all old category to new category URLs and wrote redirect rules, page-to-page redirects in several instances where URLs had changed, and an analysis of top 500 pages to check for outliers.
5. I wouldn't call this a hunch migration. From an SEO perspective, I solely focused on getting the redirects in place, and perhaps didn't put enough thought into whether or we should have moved to a new domain from an SEO perspective and whether the cons outweighed the other business decisions behind the move.

[effectdigital]

"the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank" - the prior response from Dmitrii Kustov hit the nail on the head here. This was terrible information. It's well known that although 301 redirects insulate the most possible equity, it's not a sure-fire thing and there usually is down-turn (sometimes significant). The information upon which you were acting was bad.

Redirects also decay over time, so if they have pumped much of the initial equity-bonus into dead, defunct pages which were never meant to exist, you won't get all of that back (even if you fix the redirects). 3-4 days in this probably won't hit you like a sledgehammer (if you fix things NOW this second) - but you will feel it a bit.

Considering that not all PageRank is transferred through 301 redirects, you probably won't recover to your former strength in terms of rankings on redirects alone. If you have made other positive movements (switching to HTTPS, faster page-loading speeds on the new site, better site design, promotional links work for the new domain) then you may recover quickly and even begin to exceed prior performance. If you have literally just changed domain and done nothing else, expect a bit of a rough ride.

If your old domain is no longer in use and is purely a platform for redirects now, it will begin to lose its authority. Google doesn't rank 'doorway' pages. Google doesn't like to rank URLs which then redirect somewhere else! As such, if you have killed your old domain off then you need to be making movements to boost the new domain's authority, so that when the old domain fully decays (and the 301s along with it), you're not left in a hole.

You say "We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority" - that's an incorrect statement. Domain authority is attached to a domain, not to a company. You **had **strong domain authority, it may now be decaying with some amount being transferred to your new site.

Where you write:

"is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain?" - there's a whole barrel of worms there. This implies that the old domain is carrying on in some form without your individual part of the business! As such, that domain authority will belong to 'them' and your new site will **only **receive a maximum of equity relating to the 'part' of the site that moved, not the site in its entirety. You won't perform the same as the main / parent site, if you're just a tiny extract. That's an unreasonable expectation! Authority divides it doesn't multiply

Depending on your situation the outcomes could vary wildly. If the old site is completely shut down and turned into a redirect farm, with the kinds of cited muck-ups I'd expect to maybe see 75-80% performance if everything is handled perfectly from ... well, from right now. If you're just an extract of the parent site and they're retaining the 'bulk' of their SEO ranking power, you can't expect to be on that same level. Otherwise SEOs would just recommend all clients to turn their sites into 10 sites and they would all rank equally well (that demonstrably does not work and is not the case)

The main Questions are, has the full site moved? What is the nature of the new site, is it a re-build or just a tiny extract being separated out? Has the site shed a lot of content? Did you benchmark which URLs held the most, and most lucrative rankings before moving - or did you just do a dev-based one-size fits all redirect catch based on logic (but not data)? Did you do a 'hunch' migration? If so, expect to feel the sting

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

First, "...the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank" - where did you get that info? 0.o It's well-known fact that there always be a downdraft with a period of recovery.

To answer your question - yes, you'll recover (assuming all 301s were done correctly). But it will take time. The problem is that your shop initially had the power and authority of your main domain (when it was brand.com/shop/blabla). Now, it's a brand new domain, with no history. And yes, even though you have redirects, it's still much closer to starting new domain, rather than redirecting domain completely.

Think of it as instead of building second story on top of existing house, you have to build brand new building with foundation and all, using some materials from your existing house. Who suffers? - both. You are taking away from existing place, and it will take longer and more resources to build up new place. Is it beneficial? - Sure, after both buildings are built - you'll have 2 great places to live in.

Hope this makes sense