New website put up and ALL my keywords fell a LOT!???
-
I helped a client redesign their new website and we just went live a couple weeks ago. This morning I checked his campaign and 53 keywords fell DRAMATICALLY. Like 35-50 places down in Google for dozens of keywords!?
I haven't ever seen a drop that's so dramatic when putting up a new site.
Have you ever seen this? Will they bounce back? This site isn't significantly different than the last one.
We did forward two other domains to this new site but that wouldn't make a difference, would it?
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Matthew
-
Matthew, I wrote a piece here a while back about what to make sure you do when relaunching/revamping a website to avoid ranking disaster. You may find it gives you some answers. I would also say, dont panic yet. A website redesign is a huge code change and flux can be expected initially.
-
I'm sorry. I should have been more clear. No, their domain name didn't change. Thank you very much for all the responses! You gave me some things to think about. I will give it a little time.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Matthew
Unless those domains had particular bad link profiles or indeed had a penalty put on them, then I think you're right and we can rule out that reason.
I'd first check webmaster tools and see if there are any large crawl errors - you basically want to make sure that all of the pages on the site are accessible by Google, all of the links pointing to the site are working (or redirected to a working URL) and that your 404 page is working (and not returning soft 404s). Should you find something irregular here, that's where I'd start ASAP.
I'm guessing one of these domains was the old website URL? In this case (and apologies if this sounds obvious and you've already done this) I'd double check the 301 redirect has worked properly, so that all the old links pointing to the website are now.
Now, as for the rankings that have dropped - are they across the board and for all keywords, or are they limited to specific keyword groups or specific landing pages? Depending what the result is here this could mean a number of things. When you did the 301 redirect, did you redirect the URLs to the equivalent pages on the new domain, or all to the homepage? If its the latter, is there a chance that the links you were pointing to the old site are now not "powering" the equivalent pages on the new site, as they're going to the homepage?
Similarly, if the rankings that have dropped all go to the same landing page, then there could be a problem on-site or off-site with that page. On-site, Google might not think the new page is very useful to the reader if there is not a lot of content it can crawl and read. Off-site, the algorithm may have devalued some old links to that page if it thinks they are not useful/editorial, such as old directory listings or article site links.
If the drop is across the board, for a number of keywords and landing pages, it could indicate a penalty of sorts, so I would check your webmaster tool messages for any link warnings.
If there's no warnings there, nothing out of the ordinary in terms of errors and your confident that your links are editorial and authoritativ and so would not have had a bunch of links devalued, then I would call for a bit of patience to see if things recover. After all, the Googlebot is going through a bunch of new pages and might have freaked out a little bit - but hopefully I've provided a few things to check in the meantime, in case the drop becomes sustained.
Hope this helps Matthew, wish I could be more of a help.
-
When you redesigned the site, did you change the URLs?
For example, did you change--
example.com/miami-homes/ to example.com/miami-homes.asp?
And if so, did you 301 redirect all of the old pages to their new locations?
With the info provided, that's my best guess.
-
Is it the same domain name or just a new site redesign and not a new 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
-
How can I increase my website speed?
Hi, I hope you are doing good. My website speed is too much slow. Mobile speed is 12 and Desktop speed is 39. Please check my website speed.
Web Design | | Bigbrand
&
What can I do for my website to increase speed?
What is best way to increase website speed. Here is my website: https://www.myqurantutor.com/0 -
What are the downsides and/or challenges to putting page paths (www.example.com/pagepath) on a different server?
Hi, Our company is organized into three different segments and our development team recently needed to switch a portion of the business to subdomain because they wanted to move to a different server platform. We are now seeing the impact of moving this segment of the business to a subdomain on the main domain. SEO is hurting and our MOZ score has dropped significantly. One fix they are debating is moving everything back to one domain, but place segments of the business on different page paths and hosting specific paths on different servers. I.e. the main domain could be www.example.com hosted in one location and then www.example.com/segment1 would be hosted on a different server. They are hoping to accomplish this using some sort of proxy/caching redirection solution. The goal of this change would be to recapture our domain strength. Is this something that is a good option or no? If not, what are the challenges and issues you see arising from doing something like that as I don't know of any other site set up like this. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | bradgreene0 -
Traffic Dropping To Website
Hi In Google Analytics:
Web Design | | SEOguy1
I have noticed up to 50% of traffic coming to the website drops off at the home page point,
and drops further from other pages on the site. I realise some may possibly say that this could be down to various factors such as server issues, poor web design, or the wrong traffic reaching the site I have did corrected the following: There was an issue with there being www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home, Screaming Frog and Moz showed that these both had duplicate meta tagging issues. Initially I had created a separate page called 'home' to include in the main nav bar under the slider, but yesterday I replaced this page with a request in the functions.php to place 'home' in the nav bar as a redirect back to the home www.domain.com page. This works great. So I now have the following 301 permanent redirects: non-www to www resolve in the htaccess file, plus 2 permanent 301 redirects in the nav bar. I wonder if this is acceptable protocol re the nav bar redirects, and I wonder if you could possibly advise if the actions that I have taken will have any negative impact on the web seo, link structure, crawlability or indexing. Thanks.0 -
Changing website to Mobile site
Hi All, We are building a new website and would take it live in next few weeks. I want help to understand what all should we consider.. The site structure would be same with additional features but the URL path and site name is same...Should i take any precausions before shutting down the old site and getting the new one live? Thanks
Web Design | | jomin740 -
Website title next to a post title-how to remove it?
I just have checked on some of the keyword I am ranking for and found in the serp that next to the post I have also the site name. But I thought that I have remove it. Does somebody know how to remove it? perhaps I did not do it correctly. I am also using yoast seo plugin but I do not have it set there to show the site name after posts name. Can somebody help me to fix this please? I have also attached an image from the serp where is behind the post title also Villas Diani-the site name Thank you very much! Iris O1oj4W0.jpg
Web Design | | Rebeca10 -
Any advice for best practice for mobile versions of websites?
Hi Mozzers, I am looking to develop a mobile version of one of my sites and was wondering what was considered best practice for the following: Where to host it: m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile ? Is rel='canonical' enough to avoid mobile version being indexed or should I use "noindex" on mobile version? How to handle tablets? Which screen size sees mobile version? Which sees full site version? Thanks in advance Geoff
Web Design | | SEM-Freak1 -
I need to buy a website template - anyone knows a good place to buy it? where you should buy one template?
I used the www.templatemonster.com or http://themeforest.net/, but is difficult to find a template with a focus on SEO. Also with the necessity to include text in the beginning of the website, is difficulty to found something really good.
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!
Web Design | | RishadShaikh590