Botched domain migration
-
tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic.
All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then...
Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump
Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels
Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic).
Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over.
Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really.
Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished.
Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.
-
One more detail of note
The old site still shows in google site: search, two full years after everything is 301'ed.
Change of address was not used - is that critical to ensure that PR passes?
If so - it doesnt allow redirecting into a subfolder - what do you recommend in this cases - temporarily change our 301 to point to newsite.com instead of newsite.com/subfolder in able to get past this blocker in the GSC change of address tool?
"The old site redirects to newsite.com/xxxx, which does not correspond to the new site you chose."
-
Hi David, I will shoot you a PM, I think thats best. Thanks for your offer.
-
Hi Sonar,
Sorry to hear about your migration troubles!
I don't think you will find generic advice too helpful, but I'd be happy to take a quick look to see what's going on and possibly give you some specific recommendations.
Are you able to share the domains with me in this thread or through PM?
Cheers,
David
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
-
Google still listing old domain
Hi We moved to a new domain back in March 2014 and redirected most pages with a 301 and submitted change of domain request through Google Webmaster tools. A couple of pages were left as 302 redirect as they had rubbish links pointing to them and we had previously had a penalty. Google was still indexing the old domain and our rankings hadn't recovered. Last month we took away the 302 redirects and just did a blanket 301 approach from old domain to new in the the thinking that as the penalty had been lifted from the old domain there was no harm in sending everything to new domain. Again, we submitted the change of domain in webmaster tools as the option was available to us but its been a couple of weeks now and the old domain is still indexed Am I missing something? I realise that the rankings may not have recovered partly due to the disavowing / disregarding of several links but am concerned this may be contributing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ham19790 -
Massive URL Migration with thousands of 301
Hey Everyone! I'm currently working on a project that we have A Lot of product pages and we have thousands of URL's that need to be 301'd over. I know this can be a major issue and could lead to tons of errors. What is everyone's thought of doing such a huge Migration, Should I do it all in phases? or should I do them all at once so they can all be indexed together? What would you suggest to be the best way to go about doing such a massive migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Domain Issue
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust. I have a few questions.... -Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy? Any guidelines on how to value domains? If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info? Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Link to domain
Let's say i want to rank for rental car service and purchases a domain rental-car-service and creates a site http://www.rental-car-service.com There will be few persons who won't use anchor text to link to the site, but will simply link using URL ( in this case http://www.rental-car-service.com ) So, will a link to http://www.rental-car-service.com from another site using http://www.rental-car-service.com as anchor text help the keyword rental car service ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Redirect on exact match domain to Brand domain question :)
Hi, If I have a website with the domain crazysocks.co.uk and a title tag 'black socks' would I see any benefit redirecting blacksocks.co.uk to crazysocks.co.uk, to give my keyword 'black socks' a boost in the SE's from the EMD. I see it loads where an EMD is indexed for its term but when you click the result it redirects to a branded domain. I personally cant see this being true but wanted to double check.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0 -
301 from penalized domain to new domain
I have a client whose site isn't necessarily penalized since they still show for many terms in the SERPS, however at one point they did an xrummer blast of 13,000 links for two anchor texts they were trying to rank for. They have purchased a new domain and have gone white hat and want to 301 some of the old site to the new purely for the users sake so past visitors still find them at t the new location. Will creating 301 redirects pass on to the new domain any bad Karma from the old one in Google's eyes? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshGill270