What should I expect after completely redoing a website?
-
Hello Forum,
My team and I have completely redone an eCommerce website, which offers new SEO-friendly URLs. We have also taken care to optimize our product and category pages for specific keywords, so as to keep our regular traffic and increase the long-tail.
In the old un-optimized website, many of its Google search results simply took users to the homepage, thus the homepage has a lot of external link juice. Our new site is optimized so that users are taken to the page most relevant to their query. For example (we are a yoga site), with the old site a search for "yoga bolsters" would take visitors to the homepage. Now the search results take the users to the yoga bolster page.
These new pages don't have the amount of external links as the new site and I've noticed a decrease in our site's average rank in Google Webmaster Tools
1.Given our new site with its new URLs, should this increase be expected? (we have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new)
2. What steps would you take to ensure you keep your rankings with the new site? Are they any special tools you recommend?
3. What the best way to increase the ones that have dropped? Page optimization? Link building? Both?
-
A few steps to take:
-
Ensure your 301 redirects are working properly. More specifically, each redirect should complete in a single hop. Correct any cases where a URL is redirected multiple times.
-
Set up a 404 page on the new site and monitor any traffic to the page. If you notice any URLs repeatedly appearing determine the source and fix it.
-
For phrases which you have built new pages, use anchor text from the old page to direct users and search engines to the new page. For example, if you mention "yoga bolsters" on your home page, use it as anchor text and provide an internal link to your /yoga-bolsters page.
-
Work to ensure each page on your site targets a single keyword or phrase. Provide internal linking as appropriate. For example any time "yoga bolsters" is mentioned on any page of your site, the first mention should be anchor text to your /yoga-bolsters page. You can use Wikepedia as an example in this regard.
-
Update any backlinks you control. If you control a link to your home page with the text "yoga bolsters", change the link to the new page.
-
Crawl your site using the SEOmoz crawl tool or something similar. Make sure your site is solid (i.e. no broken links, no redirects, etc).
-
Ensure your new sites navigation is solid. You usually do not want a link to every page. Generally speaking you want to keep under 100 links per page. If you offer too many links you may not be managing your site's PR and rankings can be negatively impacted.
Once the above steps are completed it can take a month for search engines to fully crawl your site and discover all of it's content. Your rankings should settle down thereafter. At that point your main focus is to earn at least some links to each new page on your site.
-
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
-
Since implementing GDPR, has anyone seen website traffic plummet?
On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jason_Taylor0 -
Connect AMP to the same website GA property or not
Hi, Asking this on behalf of a client:"I know Google recommends setting up a separate GA property for AMP which they note in a few places:https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/amp-analytics/https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6343176?hl=en
Reporting & Analytics | | MediaCause
From what we can tell this is because the tracking for AMP will measure things differently than the current analytics.js library. I also think it's related to the GA cookie and how it's set differently for AMP pages.But won't this cause drop-off in user journey information? For example, if a user views an AMP blog article but then clicks to our site from a link within the article. I think we would then track this as two separate users and the pages/visit would be off. I found this article which explains a tech way to connect AMP to the same website GA property but it seems a little too much of a work-around:https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/google-analytics-client-id-amp-pages/ Do you think we should just do what Google recommends and set up AMP as a separate property in GA?" --> Does anyone know if there could be any issues with this workaround?Thanks,0 -
Why might my websites crawl rate....explode?
Hi Mozzers, I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically: 9/5/16 - 923
Reporting & Analytics | | Silkstream
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809 I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.1 -
Goal Tracking In Analytics On Separate Ordering Website
I have a question for any Google Analytics wizards out there. We have two clients that have a similar complication when it comes to tracking goal conversions in Analytics. Basically, all the conversion actions we want to track occur on a separate website; either an iframe embedded on the page or through an entirely different ordering website. Trick is, Analytics sees the source for all these conversions as referrals from the main site. We'd like to get visibility back to the original source/medium that brought visitors to the site before they converted. Anyone have a suggestion for making that happen?
Reporting & Analytics | | fivefifty0 -
Can you help me figure out what happened to my website search results in Google?
On or about the 24th of April I noticed an abrupt decrease in traffic to my website:
Reporting & Analytics | | rdominey
http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com Sorry this might be long but I’m trying to be as thorough as possible. I thought that I had been hacked, a virus, maybe penalized by Google I don’t know what ? I submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they responded with the following: Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions found
May 10, 2012
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
Here is an example:
Key Phrase: Free Services to Help Improve Your Photos on Canvas
Website: http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/free-photo-canvas-retouching
Attached are some screen shots of the actual search results on Bing, Yahoo and Google along with the ranking tool results from SEOmoz and the on page grade for the key phrase.
Anybody got any Ideas? I am hurting; the internet and Google search is about 40% of by business. http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Bing-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Yahoo-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Google-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SEOmoz-Ranking.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SEOmoz-Report-Card.jpg [" target="_blank">iframe>](<iframe class=) Bing-Free-Services.jpg Yahoo-Free-Services.jpg Google-Free-Services.jpg SEOmoz-Ranking.jpg SEOmoz-Report-Card.jpg0 -
Is there a tool to automatically gather website SEO data?
I am looking for a tool that will crawl a website and create a spreadsheet listing out all key data such as title, meta description, etc. Anyone know of an available tool to do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | jfeitlinger0 -
Open explorer is not finding my website information yet?
Majestic SEO and even yahoo sitemap see's it... why not SEOMOZ? The website is a few months old already. www.lackofsleephq.com
Reporting & Analytics | | sleepmaster0 -
How do you add Facebook Insights to Multiple Websites?
If I have 4 top-level domain websites all for the same corporate company but with different focuses (ie/ engineering, technology etc.) and I want to add Facebook insights, should I add the same meta tag to all websites or should I create separate meta tags? If I create seperate ones, the issue is that we have one main facebook page that has multiple admins that I would like to give access to but it looks like you can only associate one website to one facebook page. So from what I can tell, if I were to create separate ones, I would have to setup fake facebook pages or fake profiles in order to get different facebook insights meta tags? I'm hoping there is a better way... or maybe I should just put the same meta tag code on all 4 websites? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | randstadsocial0