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
-
Spammy structured data for http://www.heritageprinting.com/ might be dropped from search results
We received the above message, which I'm see may also have. Before I go making hours of edits can someone give me an opinion on what may need fixed? Here's a link to one of our products: http://heritageprinting.com/products/step-and-repeat.phpAll products are uniquely marked upIt may be the $ dollar sign, but I'm not certain.Looking at WMT > Search Appearance > Structured Data, I see no errors for Schema Markup. TY in advance :)KJr
Technical SEO | | KevnJr0 -
Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?
Hi Everyone I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO. Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out. The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week. That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week. Does anyone have any experience of new channels coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it? thanks all!
Technical SEO | | NappyValleyNet1 -
Dropped out of Bing index!! (and Yahoo too)
When I search for my site via site:domain.com or url:domain.com the are ZERO results except for this Some results have been removed which goes to http://help.bing.microsoft.com/#apex/18/en-US/10016/0 We are a total white hat website. What should I do? Is there someone at Bing I can contact? I dont see anyway via Bing Webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | corlin0 -
How can you get accurate search traffic volumes?
I have been trying to get accurate search volumes for the search term "how to dance" in the UK. The results seems to vary wildly. Please could someone tell me how many people actually search for this term each month in the UK on Google (or any other search engine for that matter!)? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
35% Drop In Traffic Since March 23 2012
Hi, I am aware ofth e penguin and panda updates and have been monitoring my traffic for the last few months. I did notice that for some reason, from about 22nd / 23rd March we had a drop in traffic by about 50%, it stabilised in a few days but since then from april to present has been hovering around 35% drop in traffic. what perplexes me is hat I also monitored our rankings and that was fine, pretty much the same, yet traffic is down. I have noticed our longer tail keywords have lost traffic by as much as 60-900% I would really appreciate some input, do you think this could be down to panda pulling pages out. how can i find track pages indexesd for my site over time to see if this is where he problem is. I havea lso noticed that in webamster tools, a domain preferance is not set, it is set to default "do not set a preferred domain", would this not cause a dup content issue, what should it be set to, post panda? Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is really hurting our business. thanks you in advance
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
How to Resolve Rankings Drop from a DDOS Attack?
Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board. There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved. Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last? How can we deal with this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Drop Down Menu as Pagination
Hi, We currently use a drop down menu option for our paginated pages using JavaScript, what would be the best search engine friendly way around this?
Technical SEO | | CameronT0 -
Switching to another CMS with different permalink structure, how not to lose organic traffic and Google rankings? Urgent Please!
One of my customers is in online jewellery sales business and they are going to change their CMS; the problem is there is no co-relation between URL permalink structure of the current CMS and the new one. What should we do so that we don’t lose our current organic traffic (also Google rankings) coming from indexed URLs in Google due to permalink structure change ? Typical example: Current URL: http://www.abc.com/pirlanta-nedir,AR-3.html The new URL is going to look like this: http://www.abc.com/tek-tas-pirlanta-ar-4.html
Technical SEO | | merkal20050