Should we reinstate the old website?
-
In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well.
A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?
-
The true answer to reinstating the old site depends upon the quality of work done on the many parts of the job by the PR agency. If this was my site, and it was performing kickass before these PR guys got their hands on it, I would toss the old version back up and do a deeper assessment - because the results thus far suggest that the PR agency doesn't know much about SEO.
<kibitz>In the past few years a lot of PR agencies have become spammers who wear suits to work.</kibitz>
-
If the refresh was just because the site looked dated, why was all the content updated?
A complete rebuild of the site seems a little drastic if it only needed a facelift. Were there other concerns?
As Kevin asked, were 301s set up? if there were no 301's set up, any previous links will no longer be passing juice, which could have a serious impact.
-
Were 301 redirects put in place? If so, was the content, more or less, the same? Was there specific pages that dropped in traffic and others stayed the same? Did you see anything in Search Console?
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
-
Old homepage in google on branded keyword
Hello there, I have a strange problem: if you search "probike" (romanian google.ro), i get an OLD homepage with https://www.probike.ro , and my new homepage is https://probike.ro, the real problem is that title/meta description are not available (see attachment). Redirect 301: Ok
Technical SEO | | Shanaki
Robots.txt: Ok
Sitemap: Ok Help, is annoying 🙂 With respect, Andrei I33gThc0 -
Setting Up A Website For Redirects
I've got an old defunct domain with a lot of backlinks to individual pages. I'd like to use these backlinks for link juice by redirecting them to individual pages on the new domain (both sites belong to the same company). What is the best way to set this up? I presume I need some kind of hosting & site, even if it's just a default Wordpress install, which I can then use to set up the redirects? Would it be best done using .htaccess file for 301 redirects or some other way?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Redirect if old browser or OS to other domain?
Hi, I use cloudflare free SSL option. All is fine except it wont work with windows XP . How do you think is it ok in case of old OS/Browser redirect visitors to other domain or subdomain? What could be impacts or consequences of such step? On the moment if page meko.lv is accessed from XP sp1,2 there is error. If it is possible how could such redirect look? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mekounko0 -
Converting Old Web Site to Wordpress
I have a website I would like to update and convert to WordPress. My site rates very highly for the keywords I care about and I have a lot of domain authority and page authority that I don't want to lose. I'm concerned about the switch as I don't want to hurt my Google positioning, but would like the benefits of a WordPress site. Any assistance and advice is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | greg.baumgartner0 -
Duplicate page issue in website
i found duplicate pages in my website. seomoz is showing duplicate web pages this is issue or not please tell me?
Technical SEO | | learningall0 -
What are the pros and cons of having a single page website format?
I have a website www.capitolshine.com that is in a single page format (that scrolls to other page)What are the negative effects for crawling or tracking bounce rate, etc. Should I change to individual pages? Is there a way to do this without reprogramming the entire website?
Technical SEO | | CapitolShine0 -
Deleted Old Site - Relaunched on Same Domain
Now I have a bunch of links that are dead. (45 to be exact) What should I do? Rebuild the links, 301 redirect them to the homepage, 410 them? I didn't get a lot of external traffic from the links (maybe ~500 uniques/mo). Of that traffic, most of the users would bounce, my SEO wasn't very good so the content they received wasn't as relevant as it could have been. I'm not really worried about losing the traffic, but rather minimizing any penalty from google.
Technical SEO | | winefolly1 -
Removing pages from website
Hello all, I am fairly new to the SEOmoz community. But i am working for a company which organizes exhibitons, events and training in Holland. A lot of these events are only given ones ore twice and then we do not organise them any more because they are no longer relevant. Every event has its own few webpages which provide information about the event and are being indexed by Google. In the past we did not remove any of these events. I was looking in the CMS and saw a lot of events of 2008 and older which are being indexed. To clean the website and the CMS i am thinking of removing these pages of old events. The risk is that these pages have some links to them and are getting some traffic, so if i remove them there is a risk of losing traffic and rankings. What would be the wise thing to do? Make a folder with archive or something? Regards, Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0
