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
-
Why did my website DA fell down?
Hello, Could you please let me know why might my website's DA have fallen down in merely a week? What might be a reason? I also noticed traffic from google dropped down at the very same week. Will be very thankful for any advise!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Does 404 hurts my website.?
Does 404 hurts my website.? My website reporting 404 crawl errors on pages that have never been part of the website. Site showing lot of 404 errors and all errors from Blog.We didn't create any pages .Automatically pages are created and showing 404 (Not Found) error response..Please any one help me to identify those issues.?
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Our Website Get too many visits from this IP ?
Hi, We get alot of visits from this IP below... Whats this ? | Host Name: | google-proxy-66-249-85-8.google.com | Browser: | IE 8.0 |
Technical SEO | | Asjad
| IP Address: | 66.249.85.8 — [Label IP Address] | Operating System: | WinVista |
| Location: | Mountain View, California, United States | Resolution: | 1024x768 |0 -
How to Remove a website from your Bing Webmaster Tools account
I have a site in Bing Webmaster Tools that I no longer work on. I can't seem to find where to delete this website from my webmaster tools account. Anyone know how (there doesn't seem to be anything obvious under Bing Help or on a Google Search).
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Links into website that are unnatural - a paid article
I prepared an article for another related website and posted it on my website - http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-ideas/save-money-and-create-diversity-seeds-and-small-plants-are-better/ I was paid to write an article and provided a link to the related website at the end of the article - I declared the payment a good 10 months later the page where the article sits has become the 2nd most linked to page on my website - SEOmoz is giving it a Page Authority of 48 and all the links are coming from a wide variety of forums using one anchor text link phrase in the latest google update my homepage PR dropped by 1 - I am assuming the penalty came because of this article is it worth changing the URL to remove these spammy links to my website?
Technical SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Sitemap for dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)
Technical SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Linking from other language websites passes juice or not?
If i get links from websites with different language than english - has the same sort of field (business type) ... will that pass juice or not? Is it worth linking or not?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0