Heavy rank drop post migration
-
Our website has been migrated from Joomla to Wordpress at the end of 2015 and we have tasted the loss of 20% of the traffic. After an year at the end of 2016, we have relaunched the website in same word press with new theme. Again we lost n rankings and traffic. I would say ranking. Because mostly people land on our website by searching for our brand. Now we almost went invisible for "keywords" we been targeting. We have checked all the possibilities like duplicate content, redirection, alt tags, speed, canonicals, backlinks, etc..and couldn't find what is hitting us. What could be such strong factor hitting us ?
-
Hi Dana,
We didn't change the domain name. Same domain name for last 10 years. Recently we migrated to same CMS (Wordpress to wordpress). Just redesigned the website and launched back
-
Hi vtmoz. Did you change your domain name? Or just migrate to a different CMS?
-
What steps did you take during these website redesign to preserve your rankings? 301 redirects are often overlooked during site migrations, if you don't take time to map old pages to new pages, you've missed a massive opportunity to hang on to a lot of the rankings and traffic you had with the previous version of the site.
There's a great post on SEO preservation on the Moz blog from a few years back, I'd go through this list and figure out what was overlooked. You should still go back and fix anything you can, but it won't have nearly the impact it would have if the tasks on this list were done at the appropriate time.
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
-
Amp plugins + Wordpress = speed, rankings, results
Hello beloved, Been some time since I have been on, planning to return and help out and be bit more active. Need some latest thoughts and input, on amp plugins for Wordpress, and their results and effect on rankings? Thank you all in advance 🙂
Web Design | | vmialik0 -
Looking for a new Web Developer and Graphic Designer - Where to look? Job Description in Post
Hi All, I know I can go to Guru.com, etc. but is there a place here that I can look for a web dev that can help with my tasks? I have a good bit of work to offer them and my current web dev who has been a great asset has suffered from health problems and it has affected his output, so I'm sad to say I need to look for someone that can help me get caught back up. If anyone has any suggestions on someone that is a knowledgeable web developer that has access to their own graphic designer (or can do graphic design themselves as well) please let me know. I am not opposed at all to hire a separate graphic designer to send work over to the web developer. SOMEONE WITH SEO EXPERIENCE WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL AS WELL AS MY CURRENT WEB DEVELOPER HAD IT AS WELL. The current projects going on are: Changing the header graphics on the home page to meet compliance. Constantly adding and editing my websites with small tweaks almost daily. Creating PDF's with content we give and uploading them as well as images to the sites. Keeping in mind that editing the site can affect responsiveness and we have to make sure our logo is a certain size compared to other metrics, etc. Creating web banners, tile ads, etc. Creating facebook main photo for biz page. I will be happy to share any info via PM or if anyone can point me in the right direction in finding someone that would be awesome! Thanks!
Web Design | | Veebs1 -
What is the Estimated Time for SERP Rankings to Replenish after a Site Redesign?
Hello Fellow Moz'ers, My company's website, www.1099pro.com, is currently OLD and not mobile-friendly! However, we rank #1 for out most important keywords and don't want to lose that ranking. I've recently redesigned our site, currently in testing, to use the same standard desktop pages but to also have responsive, mobile friendly, pages for different view ports. My question is if anyone knows an estimated time frame that search engines (mainly Google) takes to re-crawl the site and restore SERP rankings to their previous levels? The reason is because we are HIGHLY seasonal and if we are not back at our top rankings by early December, at latest (November would be better), then we stand the chance to lose a considerable amount of traffic/revenue. -The Unenlightened One
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
Trying to rank on top 3 in Google.co.uk for a moderate competitive keyword by having a .dk domain
Do you think I should switch my domain to a .com and use ccTLDs method for my other international domains ? The problem is that my .dk domain(norwell.dk) has a better SEO ranking that my .com domain (norwelloutdoorfitness.com) and also differs slightly in name. The primary keyword I want to rank is ' outdoor fitness' which is in the name of 'norwelloutdoorfitness.com', thus over the long-term providing better benefits. Let me know what you think. Thanks, Andrei
Web Design | | kkk92330 -
Does a Website Overlay Hurt Ranking?
We are looking into personalizing visits on our website. Rather than to write Tb of code on each page, we want to use a little line of Java script on the page, that would allow to place overlay on the site, depending on the visitor. Example: Change the home page picture when a returning visitor comes back on the website and show him/her a different picture bases upon the pages he/she visited prior. Would that overlay be caught by Google and would G have a problem with that? We all know about cloaking, but G does not penalize for heat mapping overlays, for example. Or not to my knowledge they don't. Thanks all for your personal insights! Peter
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Rankings Dropped After Redesign
Hi, I've recently redesigned our website with the main changes being sidebar changes and source ordering (making the main content appear before the sidebars). No URL changes have been made. A few days after making these changes our positions dropped heavily and have been dropping ever since. It's been a week and a half now and traffic is down by around 40%. Google has the new changes cached. Do people feel this just a temporary drop and will we rankings to go back at least or should we revert to the old structure? Website: http://www.diyorgasms.co.uk (NSFW) Thanks
Web Design | | diyorgasms0 -
Is this causing me to drop in rank?
Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title. I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes. Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here: http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/
Web Design | | NoahsDad0