Recovering from a site migration
-
Hi. I've been working on http://www.alwayshobbies.com/ for a number of months. All was fine, but then we had a site migration which involved a huge number of redirects. There's been a couple of similar moves in the past. As a result, rankings have plummeted.
To resolve this, we're considering letting all the old pages 404 by turning of the redirects, and removing all links to them where we can. Some key pages could have canonicals added, but basically we're looking to purge as much as possible. Does this sound like a reasonable tactic?
-
Hi. Thanks for your comments. The migration happened six months ago, and there's no sign of recovery. I've seen quite a few big migrations tank due to mass redirects, and every one I've worked on that kept URLs largely the same has been fine.
Our crawl errors are now pretty low, and we keep working through any that come up. It's frustrating work!
-
I wouldn't think that's your problem or your answer. If you've been working on it for months and recently did the migration, it can take some time for the redirects to take effect. Are you verifying that new URLs are being indexed? If they are, are they receiving the same traffic as the old ones? If not, what's different about the content on those pages? Did you drastically change your navigation or your content? If you made sure that, at least, you redirected old pages that were getting search traffic and had exterior links to them, things should pick up again.
If you made the redesign as an organic SEO effort for a site that didn't already have enough authority to bring in the search traffic that you want, the redesign probably isn't going to help. If you redesigned a site or URLs that didn't get crawled often, the redesign isn't likely to help them get crawled more often. You have to make sure that your new URLs are indexed and then compare their search traffic to the old URLs in order to determine if there is a problem.
-
Sorry to hear you're having trouble after your migration, it's all too common to see this happen when sites are migrated or new sites go live.
The most important thing is to make sure all old pages have been 301 redirected to the relevant new page / if no relevant page to the homepage.
The drop in rankings could be due to backlinks pointing at pages which now 404 - if you haven't already use a backlink explorer such as Open Site or Majestic SEO and make sure none of your incoming backlinks are 404's, if they are get them redirected asap.
Has the site moved to a new domain or is it just a relaunch?
Also have a look at this article on site migration - http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
Danny
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
-
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Old sitemaps after site migration.
Hi, I was wondering if it's safe to remove all the sitemaps from the old site in search console? It's been 3 months since site migration from http://sitea.com (301 redirected) to http://siteb.com. Therefore, can I delete the old sitemap from the http://sitea.com from search console? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Links from random sites: Disavow?
I am looking at the links to my site from GWT. I see a bunch of random sites I've never heard of. I never made an effort to get links from these sites. Sites like | http://www.xlx.pl | Also found one porn site! Should I just ignore these or disavow them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Potential problems with my site
Dear Mozzers I hope you can help me with the following problems: My site is up and running for a year now and may be there has been problem with the homepage, because it ranks on first page for a competitive keyword on Google.com and Google.com.au only, however in other countries it just shows up as internal page and does not rank well. google.com/Google.com.au: homepage ranks top 10 (example.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
Other countries (.co.uk, .ca..ect) an internal page shows up, example.com/internalpage.html - shows on page 3-4. I can not find the homepage of example.com anywhere around top 1000. Can you please tell me what are the potential problems. Thank you very much. BR/Tran0 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0