Migrated site back in April and rankings have not returned.
-
I sure hope someone can help me with this. Back in April I migrated my site and did a website redesign. We implemented all the 301 redirect page for page. I lost about 40% of traffic. My main key word is baby headbands that goes to our home page. www.princessbowtique.com We were ranking at number two and have fallen down to number 9 and 10 and have recently come back up to number 8. My question is and I am wondering if there is something wrong with my HTML Code, or something else. All other pages stay lost some rankings but not as much a my home page. This home page is what gets most of my traffic and we are really hurting. I've had to let go of my employees and it's looking really bad for our business. Anyhow I'm trying to figure out what I can do it improve. I migrated to Big Commerce and they did all the 301 redirects. All catagories stayed the same url but the product pages did have 301 redirects.
-
My questions were just the tip of what could be wrong. As I said and Moosa repeated, you are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are way too many factors at play on why you may have lost some organic lately. Competitor improvements, your own site not crawling properly, parameters & duplicate content confusing Google, new site structure loads slower, etc.
There aren't another 3-5 questions we can ask to sort this unfortunately. Someone needs to dig in with your site, analytics, etc. to see what's going on. Exact dates matter (algorithm updates) as do how everything is setup for your redirects and all that. As I said, Archive.org saw your redirect as a 302. That could hurt you. There could just be so many reasons.
-
Also, we did alot of link building on the .net site and since October we have started building links again.
-
Thank you so much for all the input. We did a migration from the .net site back a few years ago. We did lost some traffic but it did resume with in a few months. I have been on the .com site for some time now. We did another migration back in April and that is when everything went down. From what I can tell, the home page did not change urls or the category pages. The product pages have 301 redirects. Also, in Goggle Webmaster tools there was alot of 404 erros ( fixed over 1,000) that show all these links that really were not even "real" links. This only happened when we change hosting companies. We are currently hosting with Big Commerce.
To answer the questions:
-
Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall? It was all organic,
-
What was your main source of traffic on the .net site? No, we migrated to the .com site in 2013 so it been some time.
-
Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them? No, all organic
-
Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile? No, not that I know of
-
Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc. How do I go about doing that?
-
-
I believe you really need someone who can do the site audit and tells you what areas of the website need more improvement. I run a screaming frog on your website and I can say that the migration was pretty much done right.
Obviously when you migrate and 301 pages from only to new domain, not all the juice pass to the new domain so loss of link juice can be one of the reason why you lost rankings for any of the key phrases.
You said you were ranking on 9 and 10 and recently moved to 8 and while I was checking your ranking on SEMRush.com it says “7” so seems like you are on your way back to your old position.
Here are the few things I would suggestion you should do.
- Hire a consultant to do the detailed audit and answer the important questions raised by Matt and few more important questions.
- As 301ing the pages result in a loss of a link juice to new pages so I will recommend building few good links pointing back to the different pages of the website.
- Also, update blog more often and see if you can engage target audience on your blog via social media and other relevant sources.
- Also make sure your site speed, page load time, server connectivity and uptime is up to the mart as this can be a reason.
Hope this helps.
-
Ah, glazed right by it.
-
www.princessbowtique.com, redirected from .net
-
You are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are a lot of factors at play:
-
Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall?
-
What was your main source of traffic on the .net site?
-
Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them?
-
Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile?
-
Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc.
Things like domain age, 301s not passing 100% of benefit, etc. will be affecting you but there could be other factors. It's very difficult to diagnose such a problem like this. Your old site had been online since 2008. That's a good amount of site age.
Also, back in September, Archive.org (Wayback Machine) found that your redirect was actually setup as a 302.
When I do a manual crawl myself or header check I see that it's setup as 301 but whatever sent them a 302 may have also been passed onto Google. I would want to check the WMT/Search Console for your site, Analytics and then maybe you'd be a lot closer to having an answer.
Hope that helps some.
-
-
Hi Tiffiny!
Are you able to share the URL for your site? It'd be helpful to be able to take a look.
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
-
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect?
If I want clean up my URLs and take the "www.site.com/page.html" and make it "www.site.com/page" do I need a redirect? If this scenario requires a 301 redirect no matter what, I might as well update the URL to be a little more keyword rich for the page while I'm at it. However, since these pages are ranking well I'd rather not lose any authority in the process and keep the URL just stripped of the ".html" (if that's possible). Thanks for you help! [edited for formatting]
Technical SEO | | Booj0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
Not ranking well in Google
Hi, I am new to Seomoz,I have some little doubts regarding <title>tag.</p> <p>Can i target 3 words in the title tag. Currently i am on top for one keyword, and i cant get the rest two in top positions. Here is my website, can anyone review my site please.</p> <p>xxx(dot)ridpiles(dot)com with keyword hemorrhoids treatment</p> <p>I have good amount of backlinks, but still something i am missing. I have 100% unique content.</p> <p> </p> <p>Regards</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Dexter22387874870 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site. The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs. Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Why did our site drop in Google rankings?
My site's URL (web address) is: http://tinyurl.com/3svn2l9 Hi there, We operate a travel site that lists numerous tours, accommodation and activities. Since 6th August 2011 we have dropped from top 10 SERP rankings of our pages to around result number 100 (page 10) and losing massive amount of visitors via Google Search. Our Yahoo and Bing rankings are still in the top10. We need your advice and quick! The last changes we have made are the following: -redirected the non-www version to the www version on the 1st August -bought advertising with a follow link in a sidebar that is being populated across the site (+4000 pages) about 2 months ago -added a blog to the website 2 weeks ago and posted 2 posts to date. Additionally, our website structure allows visitors (and bots) to see the same listings via different URLs which caused duplicate content. This has been the case since the launch of our website about 1 year ago. To prevent this duplicate content we have placed canonical tags on the individual listings pages. Why did our site all of a sudden plummet in the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020 -
Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site
I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0