Loss of traffic due to domain move, not recovering
-
I have a new client who this year chose to eliminate using a "stronger", older domain (domain authority 50) for a newer, weaker domain (domain authority 38). The redirects actually started end of 2013 and happened over time by page/section. All were completed by Jan 12 2014.
While 301 redirects are in place, and the robots.txt is disallowing all (187 pages blocked), it looks as though Google is still indexing pages (149 indexed) although not sure why. Perhaps they should be removed from the server?
In spite of the redirects, they are not getting the (combined) traffic expected. Should they have had that expectation? Could it be because they are going from a "stronger", long established domain to a "weaker", newer domain, that it may take a long time to recover?
They recently had another agency review the links on the weaker domain and they submitted a file to Google to disavow the links they found to be "toxic" however it doesn't seem to have made any difference, yet. Any idea how long it "should" take to make a difference, if it will indeed make a difference?
They do have a blog in a sub-directory that doesn't get much traffic (approx 0.50% of the total traffic). Every post ends with a blatant self-promotion and due to Penguin, they have recently begun to mix up their link text and not include a link on every post.
Last their target audience is both B-B and B-C, with B-B being priority.
The big question I have is do you see changes take place with almost instant results in Google? Or am I right in telling him, this will take some time. He feels it's been almost 4 months now and their visibility/traffic should be more in par with what it was combined.
Something to note is that they were sort of competing with themselves by using both domains however the number of searchers probably hasn't changed much...
Thank you so much for giving me your 2 cents!
xo -
This is all great information! Mozzers rule!
So I am in the process of recommending 301 redirects from a stronger domain (old but still getting a lot of traffic) to a weaker one (new, refreshed design, same product). No one is maintaing the old site and we want to pass the link juice. I am concerned that what happened to Cindy will happen to us. I want that traffic and I want to make sure that the 301 redirect will work. And of course, don't block old domain with robot.txt
One question though: What happens over time with the 301 redirect? I am assuming that the newer domain will eventually show in search results for the KWs that triggered the old domain to show. Is that a safe assumption?
-
Hi Cindy,
Checking in to see if you removed the robots.txt blocking of the old URLs. When you put 301s in place, generally that is all that is needed to show Google that one URL has moved to another - blocking in robots.txt increases the likelihood that Google won't pick this up or ignore it. Blocking the old URLs tells Google to not access any of the information on the page (it doesn't actually tell Google not to index the URL, just to not read or index any of the content on the URL, hence why you sometimes see robots.txt-blocked URLs ranking, but with no cached information.
A 301 redirect is done by the server, not information on the page itself, but it's still inadvisable to block URLs you'd otherwise want crawled for their 301s this way.
Please also make sure someone noted domain change in Webmaster Tools as Donna says. You can do this in the WMT interface and it helps inform Google that the change was made in full, that it was deliberate and completed by the site's regular owner.
My money is on the robots.txt exclusion too - changing from an older, stronger domain to one that is a little weaker should not hurt particularly if everything else is done right.
Best,
Jane
-
As to your point about " it looks as though Google is still indexing pages... ", pull up a cached version of the old, still indexed, but redirected page. See if it is a cached version of the NEW page.
I know that was a confusing question. Let me try saying it a different way.
Type the site:strongolddomain.ext command and view the cached version of one of the pages shown as still being indexed. See if the message from Google laid over the top of the cached page says "This is Google's cache of http://www.weaknewdomain.ext" or if it says "This is Google's cache of http://www.strongolddomain.ext ", If it's weaknew then you know you don't have a problem. I've seen that happen before.
Hope that makes sense...
Did you also notify google of the domain change via webmaster tools?
-
Why block the pages in robots.txt after the redirects? That seems counter productive: you want Google to see that the pages are being redirected, but you are preventing Google from looking at the redirected page.
Remove the robots.txt block and you should be okay. Also, just for fun, confirm that they are 301 redirects and not 302s, but my money is on the robots.txt.
Four months is too long after a migration to not see a recovery.
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
-
My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP1 -
Moving to https: Double Redirects
We're migrating our site to https and I have the following question: We have some old url's that we are 301ing to new ones. If we switch over to https then we will be forced to do a double-redirect for these url's. Will this have a negative SEO impact? If so, is there anything that we can do about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Search traffic down 30% this month
Our search traffic has been growing at a steady clip for the last year but is down about 30% this month. As part of a redesign, we've repurposed our home page (blog.getvero.com). Rather than serve as a feed of recent posts, it's now an email signup page. We created a new page (blog.getvero.com/posts/) to display new posts. I think this is likely the reason for the drop in search traffic but I'm frustrated that it's losing us thousands of visitors per month. A few questions: 1. How long will it take to recover from this? 2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process? 3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116983020420 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
How can i redirect my site to other domain ?
I have been running an eCommerce site since 2008 and have a PR3 with mostly have an authority link from reputed sites, how can I transfer my existing eCommerce site to the new domain so in the new domain i get SEO value from the old domain. Please advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Duplicate Sub-domains Being Indexed
Hi all, I have this site that has a sub-domain that is meant to be a "support" for clients. Some sort of FAQ pages, if you will. A lot of them are dynamic URLs, hence, the title and most of the content are duplicated. Crawl Diagnostics found 52 duplicate content, 138 duplicate title and a lot other errors. My question is, what would be the best practice to fix this issue? Should I noindex and nofollow all of its subdomains? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Moving poor content to its own domain may risk being seen as a doorway page?
We have decided to move some thin content from our primary domain to an independent domain in order to lift the panda penalty. Does anyone have suggestions for how to avoid being seen as a doorway page? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0