New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
-
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site.
My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all?
The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map.
Any help would be gladly received.
Thanks
James
-
It can take a while, sometimes up to a few months. Google doesn't work fast, and it looks like you have already resubmitted the sitemap and fetched the pages. When we launched our new site, we saw a drop for a month, then we started to come back. Now after 6 months, we are higher than we ever were.
"Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages"
Agreed.
Was the new site launched on the same domain?
-
If you want to DM me a few more details I'll take a quick look. Did you make any significant changes... hosting/domain/CMS? Have you compared speed of updated site to old one?
-
Thanks for your response, most of the urls remained the same and the small amount that weren't were 301'd correctly.
The things we are noticing are some less optimal anchors and the HTML site map missing but the XML site map correct.
I will look into the possibility of toxic links but I think this is less likely as there are not too many links and it seems a massive coincidence that it happened 3 days after the site update, but who knows!
-
Thanks for the article, the old site has been restored but the rankings have not come back after 3 days, would you have expected them to be back now?
-
Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages. I can't imagine the new site having enough technical issues or things wrong with on page optimization to cause the drop. It is also interesting timing, as the latest Penguin update happened recently, so the new site may not be the problem at all, but instead could be toxic links.
-
This is very useful when you're managing a migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos - without specific details I can't advise on other issues...
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
-
Taken a canonical off a page to let it rank with new unique content - what more can I do?
A week ago, I took a canonical off of a page that was pointing to the homepage for a very big, generic search term for my brand as we felt that it could have been harming our rankings (as it wasn't a true canonical page). A week in and our rankings for the term have dropped 7 positions out of page 1 and the page we want to rank instead is nowhere to be seen. Do I hang fire? As such a big search term, it's affecting traffic, but I don't want to make any rash decisions. Here's a bit more info: For arguments sake, let's call the search term we're going after 'Boots', with the URL where the canonical was placed of /boots. The canonical went to the root domain as we sell, well... boots. At the time, the homepage was ranking for Boots on page 1 and we wanted to change this so that the Boots page ranked for that term... all logical right? We did the following: Took off mentions of Boots from meta on the homepage and made sure it was optimised for on the boots page. Took the canonical off of /boots. Used GSC to fetch & ask Google to recrawl "/boots". Resubmitted the sitemap. Do I hang fire on running back to the safety of ranking for boots on the homepage? Do I risk keyword cannibalisation by adding the search terms back to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kelly_Edwards0 -
After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?
Six months after starting a marketing campaign and spending a lot of money on SEO audits, link removals, wire frames, copywriting and coding my web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) traffic dropped significantly after I launched a new version of my site in early June. Traffic is down about 27%, but most of the traffic from competitive terms is gone and the number of leads (phone calls, form completions) is off by about 70%. On june 6th an upgraded version of the site with mostly cosmetic changes (narrower header without social media buttons, streamlined conversion forms, new right rail was launched. No URLs were changed, and the text remained mostly the same. But somehow my developers botched up either canonical tags or Robot Text and 175 URLs with very little/no content were indexed by Google. At that point my ranking and traffic. A few days ago a request to remove those pages was made via Google WebmasterTools and now the number of pages indexed is down to 675 rather than the incorrect 850 from before. But ranking, traffic and lead generation have not yet recovered. After spending almost $25,000 over nine months this is rather frustrating. I might add the site has very few links from incoming domains and those links are not high quality. An SEO audit was performed in February and in April a link removal campaign occurred with about 30 domains agreeing to remove links and a disavow file being submitted for another 70-80 domains that would not agree to remove links. My SEO believes that we should focus on improving visitor engagement rather that on more esoteric SEO like trying to build incoming links. They think that improving useability will improve conversions and would generate results faster than traditional SEO. Also, they think that improving click through rates, reducing bounce rates will improve ranking by signaling to Google that the site is providing value to visitors. Does this sound like a reasonable approach? On one hand I don't see how my site with a MOZ domain authority could possibly compete against sites with a high number of quality incoming links and that maybe building a better link profile would yield faster results. On the other hand, it seems logical that Google would reward a site that creates a better user experience. Any thoughts from the MOZ community???? Does it sound like the recent loss of traffic is due to the indexing of the 175 pages? If so, when should my traffic and ranking return? Incidentally, these are the steps taken since last November to improve SEO: SEO Traffic & Ranking Drop Analysis and Recommendations (included in-depth SEO technical audit and recommendations). Unnatural Link Removal Program Content Optimization (Audit & Strategy with 20 page keyword matrix) CORE (also provided wireframe for /visitor-details pages at no-charge) SEO Copywriting for 10 pages New wire frames implemented on site on June 6th Jump in indexed pages by 175 on June 10th. Google Webmaster Tools removal request made for those low quality pages on June 23rd. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?
I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer. Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way? Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction. BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Why does my site keep dropping and dropping when it comes to impressions?
It all started very well but now it is all just going down and down even though I try to follow the proper guidelines. Could anyone give me some advice if I pm the link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | y3dc0 -
Could ranking problem be caused by Parked Domain?
I've been investigating a serious Google ranking drop for a small website in the UK. They used to rank top 5 for about 10 main keywords and overnight on 24/3/12 they lost rankings. They have not ranked in top100 since. Their pages are still indexed and they can still be found for their brand/domain name so they have not been removed completely. I've coverered all the normal issues you would expect to look for and no serious errors exist that would lead to what in effect looks like a penalty. The investigation has led to a an issue about their domain registration setup. The whois record (at domaintools) shows the status as "Registered and Parked or Redirected" which seems a bit unusual. Checking the registration details they had DNS settings pointing correctly to the webhost but also had web forwarding to the domain registrar's standard parked domain page. The domain registrar has suggested that this duplication could have caused ranking problems. What do you think? Is this a realistic reason for their ranking loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Ranking & Traffic drops in last month
Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed. Here are some example phrases: Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar bug shields 24 9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick
floor mats 25 14
nerf bars 23 12
running boards 61 14
snow plows 25 18 For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc. We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion. Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610 -
New domain name for existing site
Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham0