Traffic drop after migration?
-
Hi everybody.
One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas.
I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that?
Your thoughts would be great!
S
-
While I cannot speak for a whole platform (this will soon be happening), I just tested it with a single page of which I changed the URL structure as well as optimizing on-page - the whole website is one mess of spam.
I can only second the advices the posters before have given you: Wait until the crucial time for you business is over.
I experienced the following: I prepared an optimized text for the adjusted site, figured out the best keyword to rank for (quite competitive) and decided which URL would serve my needs the best. So the structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word2-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
We used 301 Permanent Redirect.
The outcome: After 2 days, the old URL was kicked out of the index. Then it took Google 6 days to index the site with the new URL structure but with disastrous ranking (28 first entry). Then it took around 5 days until we reclaimed rank 20. Three days after, we ranked 10 - and we're still there.
So for the targeted short-tail keyword, it payed off.
BUT: Nearly none of the long-tail keywords that generated traffic for the old page are ranking keywords for the page right now. Only little by little we start to rank again for them, but it is 3,5 weeks now.
To cut a long story short: I'd do it another time in the year, it is better for the client's business.
-
The change in platform required a lot of redirects, partly because we took the opportunity to improve our catalogue structure. We had a couple of good programmers in-house at the time, and they set up a script to do the redirects on all the important pages as well as a catch-all redirect which caught anything which hadn't been specified and redirected it to the new home page. Excuse me if I'm a bit vague about this - I came into SEO dealing with on-page issues and have expanded my skill set into other areas, but I don't play with the code myself! Getting the redirects right is critical to make sure the re-built site can be indexed quickly and that users don't encounter lots of error pages. I know they also did a lot of work on the new new site in a testing environment so they could find and fix as many problems as possible before launch.
-
I'd agree with holding it off, except the current architecture is so bad that the site can't cope with the increase in traffic over Christmas. We're moving to a much better, more stable platform.
What measures did you use to speed up the recovery, if any?
Thanks for your answer, it's really helpful.
-
We've had this on a move from osCommerce to Magento. We had a scary drop in rankings and traffic then everything gradually picked up again. I'd say we were back to normal within 2-3 weeks. We made the move at our quietest time of year - this was a good decision as the impact on cash flow was minimised and we had plenty of time to deal with any problems. We'll be going through it again in a few months for one of our other sites, but again we will make the change during our quietest period. Unless there is some urgent reason for them to make the change now I would advise them to hold off until a quieter time - this sort of project can throw up unexpected delays and technical issues, and you want to prevent consequential financial losses as far as possible.
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
-
Drop in keyword rankings with a multi-region website
Hi everyone, I know that variations if this question have been asked on this forum and have been answered by Google also. Google's response seems to be clear that "Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries." This was our approach when launching a new .co.nz website recently to coincide with us opening a new office in Auckland. Our original site is still our .com.au site. We went with a new domain name over a sub directory or sub domain for the reasons in the same Google article. After launching the NZ site in February and steadily growing some rankings, we've noticed in the last week or so a drastic drop in our keyword rankings (and traffic) for no apparent reason. There are no apparent issues in Search Console or with the Moz Site Crawl, so I'm wondering what's going on? I know rankings can fluctuate widely, especially when you're not on page 1 (which we're not) but the sudden and drastic drop did concern me. Currently, our AUS site's content is basically being replicated on the NZ site (e.g. blog posts, about us, company history, etc.). I just wanted to bounce it off you all to see whether you think it could be the "duplicate content" on the NZ site, or could it be something else? I'd really appreciate your input! Cheers, Nathan
Technical SEO | | reichey0 -
Migration to new URL structure
Hi guys, Just wondering what your processes are when moving a large site to a completely new URL structure on the same domain. Do you 301 everything from old page to new page, or are your more selective - i.e. only 301 pages that have a certain page authority, for example. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Massive drop off in Google crawl stats
Hi Could i get a second opinion on the following please. ON a client site we seem to have had a massive drop off in google crawling in the past few weeks, this is linked with a drop in search impressions and a slight reduction in penalty. There are no warning messages in WMT to say the site is in trouble, and it shouldn't be, however cannot get to the bottom of what is going on. In Feb the Kilobytes downloaded per day was between 2200 and about 3800, all good there. However in the past couple of weeks it has peaked at 62 and most days are not even over 3! Something odd has taken place. For the same period, the Pages crawled per day has gone from 50 - 100 down to under 3. At the same time the site speed hasn't changed - it is slow and has always been slow (have advised the client to change this but you know how it is....) Unfortunately I am unable to give the site url out so i understand that may impact on any advice people could offer. Ive attached some screen shots from WMT below. Many thanks for any assistance. stats.png
Technical SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Migration to New Domain - 301 Redirect Questions
My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name. However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name. So, my question(s) is/are: Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything? Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs? General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kenny-King0 -
Ranking dropped after domain change
Dear Moz Community, first of all excuse my bad english, i am from europe and my english is not the best 😉
Technical SEO | | domiji
I use Moz Analytics for several days and try to figure out why our "main keyword" totally dropped after our domain change. We started this year with a new company name and a new domain. Our old domain was dp-hochzeitsfotograf.de and the main keyword we try to rank for was "hochzeitsfotograf" which means "wedding photographer" here in Germany. Last summer we reached position 1 and short before our domain change we still ranked on position 6. We register the domain change in google webmaster tools and redirect all urls via 301 redirect to the new domain. Our new domain name is yourheyday.de and all rankings adopted pretty good except our main keyword (now position 62) which could break our neck the next few month. I would be so so happy and really appreciate if anyone of you have an advise for us. Thanks and many greetings from europe
Dominik0 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Major drop in visitor numbers?
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
Technical SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Migrating to a subdirectory in the same domain
Hi! I have a new version of my website, running with a different CMS (joomla). In order to install the new CMS while not loosing my all content and links I was forced to install the new site in a subdirectory. So the old website was http://www.mydomain.com And the new one is http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory I had redirected http://www.mydomain.com to http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory but I am not sure if that is correct, or if it will generate SEO problems. I named the subdirectory with a keyword, at least to have any advantage of something that to my short knowledge looks bad... What do you think? Another question... I understand that it is a good SEO rule to optimize each page for a different keyword. Is it a problem if http://www.mydomain.com is not optimized for anything? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ociosu0