404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
-
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com)
Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week.
One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
-
No, we stayed with .aspx. I was also told that we received a call from "Google" coming into our main telephone number, and it was an automated call that asked about changes to the site, and if we would like to speak to a live person. By the time the call was transferred, we lost the call. (twice.) That could have been someone from Adwords, as I was also reaching out to them about some other things. The weird part about the call was that the receptionist swears that she heard "We're calling to confirm changes to your site." before she tried to transfer the call to my office. I have never heard of Google calling regarding WMT, or site changes.
-
In your experience, once Google did manage to "unindex" the old pages, did that result in more positive ranking?
-
Did the language of your website change, meaning did you move from .aspx to .php or .html? If so we have experienced a similar situation where thousands of old pages were indexed by Google, once the site was moved to a new language we were penalized until we redirected all of the old pages.
-
I'm assuming you changed the name of all the urls' to some degree? If you kept the structure of the site and the name of the pages the same, I don't think you'd see this happening. If you did restructure and rename, you may have triggered an automatic algo penalty. I would check the external link profile to see what keywords are linking back to you. If the new urls are different from the old, that may have been the cause of the drop. 404's are always a concern, especially with old sites since there could be hundreds of pages that you may have thought were dormant, but Google keeps visiting. Even though these pages may not be linked anywhere, Google has them indexed and is still visiting. Same goes with images! They may be missing on the new server. But from what I understand, such 404's will correct themselves over time, as Google will un-index them.
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
-
What structured data would you recommend marking up for a companies 'service'?
Hi, I'm finally starting to use structured data in my clients sites now that Google has embraced it so much. I have a client that is a cosmetic physician and has associated services. I thought it would be beneficial to markup each service according to http://schema.org/Service I'll be doing a similar thing with a new local surveyors website too. I'm just wondering if it is worth doing and what Schema properties would you recommend using. For the cosmetic physician I'm thinking of: description
Web Design | | morktron
name
url
sameAs
provider
serviceArea
serviceType0 -
Image URL's and naming
We're re-platforming on Magento and wondering about our images. 1. Should I be concerned about 301 redirects for my images. 2. Is there a "best practice" path for images? or is just the name important? Right now, all our images are in /meta/images/sm or /lg or /xlg. Since we're re-platforming, we're wondering if we should change the urls. But, I'm assuming this would require all of them to have 301 redirects and with all the other redirects, I'm not sure this is really feasible. thanks for any suggestions on this.
Web Design | | centralvacuumstores0 -
Hard Lessons Learned... What's yours?
So I got a whole lot of help these past two weeks and my rankings have been skyrocketing. Then I decided to start working on the on-page SEO in the lowest category of meaning, specifically on long-tail URLs. So I shortened a few of my best keyword pages so they can be fully indexed... Let's just say that I neglected to remember I had built over 2 years some 30+ PR4-6 links to these pages. Rankings for these keywords dropped from 1-2 US listings to non-existent. Lesson Learned. But I'm still smirking 🙂 What was your big lesson/mistake in the past week?
Web Design | | HMCOE0 -
Does doubling up on domains increase my ranking?
I own two websites. One is older and contains the bulk of my content. The other is a web-based tool that has less written content, but is equally important to my business. For the sake of examples we'll call the older website "oldsite.com" and new website "newsite.com". Would it benefit my old site to direct traffic to the web-based tool using a domain like "newsite.oldsite.com"? What's the best way to integrate the two sites so I am not splitting my traffic?
Web Design | | Travis-W0 -
Will launching this site get my E-commerce site penalized?
Hello.. I am wondering if you guys think launching a site like this is a good or a bad idea. All of the links on it go directly to the exact corresponding page on the ecommerce site. Do you think Google will penalize my site for launching sites (i have many other domains that i will be setting up similar to this) like this? Thanks...
Web Design | | Prime850 -
Hom much does getting a mobile website improve the "mobile ranking"?
There's been speculation about Google totally not ranking sites that are not mobile, but as far as I can see many sites rank THE SAME on mobile devices as on regular stationary PCs/lap-tops. I had hoped for a radically improved ranking once a mobile site was built. Or is it just that it takes a TON of time for it to go through and then it gets better or is it like with regular sites that a new mobile site on a sub-domain is parked in some form of mobile-sand-box? Also, does putting a mobile site on a ranking domain, as subdomain help, e.g. m.testingsite.com instead of testingsite.mobi ? Thanks.
Web Design | | yvonneq0 -
What site do you admire/like for its SEO - technical, content, whatever - and why?
I am gathering examples of great SEO'd sites and would appreciate your examples. The rationale can be anything - great SEO structure, great linking, solid content - you think stands out. Thank you!
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
Google News we were dropped and need help finding ot why
Hi i have a site called in2town lifestyle magazine http://www.in2town.co.uk/ and up until two months ago we were with google news and for a long time. But then all of a sudden we were dropped which left us with no confidence about our site and led us to make changes to the site, some good and some bad to try and find out what was wrong with our site and why we were dropped. We have now been concentrating on sorting the site out which has led in a drop in traffic due to not updating it as we should because we are more concerned in trying to make it a quality lifestyle magazine and get back in google as well as making it a good experience for our readers.. I would like your help and finding out what you feel is wrong with our site so we can then work on it and change it and try and find out what went wrong with google news. we have spent years on the site but now we have gone in the wrong direction because we were more worried about google news. If you can advise us on how we should change the site and sort the site out and make it into the professional site it was once more then that would be great.
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860