New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
-
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site.
My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all?
The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map.
Any help would be gladly received.
Thanks
James
-
It can take a while, sometimes up to a few months. Google doesn't work fast, and it looks like you have already resubmitted the sitemap and fetched the pages. When we launched our new site, we saw a drop for a month, then we started to come back. Now after 6 months, we are higher than we ever were.
"Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages"
Agreed.
Was the new site launched on the same domain?
-
If you want to DM me a few more details I'll take a quick look. Did you make any significant changes... hosting/domain/CMS? Have you compared speed of updated site to old one?
-
Thanks for your response, most of the urls remained the same and the small amount that weren't were 301'd correctly.
The things we are noticing are some less optimal anchors and the HTML site map missing but the XML site map correct.
I will look into the possibility of toxic links but I think this is less likely as there are not too many links and it seems a massive coincidence that it happened 3 days after the site update, but who knows!
-
Thanks for the article, the old site has been restored but the rankings have not come back after 3 days, would you have expected them to be back now?
-
Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages. I can't imagine the new site having enough technical issues or things wrong with on page optimization to cause the drop. It is also interesting timing, as the latest Penguin update happened recently, so the new site may not be the problem at all, but instead could be toxic links.
-
This is very useful when you're managing a migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos - without specific details I can't advise on other issues...
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
-
Could another site copying my content hurt my ranking?
Earlier this week I asked why a page of mine might not be ranking locally. (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/what-could-be-stopping-us-from-ranking-locally). Maybe this might be part of the answer – another firm has copied huge chunks of my website copy: **My company: **https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The other company: http://studio3dm.com/studio3dm-com/video/ Could this be causing my page to not rank? And is there anything I can do about it, other than huff and puff to the other firm? (Which I am already doing.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagster0 -
Preserving SERPs during a New SIte Launch
Hi there, Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to help. You people are stellar. When launching a new site with concern for preserving the site's organic placement, which attributes or data are the most important to keep consistent from the old site to the new one? For example, site structure, urls, meta data, image file names, and so on. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leslieevarts0 -
Redirecting Old Websites to New Websites
Hi Everyone, We are about to take down a number of websites in favour of a new singular B2B hub and would be looking to redirect all of these sites to the new home. For SEO purposes, what would be the best way to do this? Due to the difference in setups and scale of the site, it would be difficult to correctly match up each page to page between the sites for individual 301 redirects. Could someone advise on the best plan of action? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chbiz0 -
Site Structure - Is it ok to Keep current flat architecture of existing site pages and use silo structure on two new categories only?
Hi there, I have a site structure flat like this it ranks quite well for its niche site.com/red-apples.html site.com/blue-apples.html The site is branching out into a new but related lines of business is it ok to keep existing site architecture as above while using a silo structure just for the two new different but related business? site.com/meat/red-meat.html site.com/fish/oceant-trout.html Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | servetea0 -
4000 new duplicate products on our ecommerce site, potential impact?
Hello, We've currently got 9500 products live on our site at the moment with ~2000 in this category that we're adding the new products in. All of these products we're adding are coming from a site that we own and we're trying to expand the range on our site (the 9500 product site has a lot more visitors than the 4000 product site). However, all these products imported I believe are atleast duplicates from the 4000 product site, but the first ones I have seen (500) are manufacturer duplicates. What issues are we potentially going to run in to? Just for extra information: We have no control over canonical/noindex/robots etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Old links showing on new domain
Last year we incurred a Google penalty and after months of trying the clean up the link profile with no joy we relaunched the site with a .org rather than .co.uk Now the issue is that 2 weeks after the launch GWMT is showing all the old links pointing to the new url. We didn't do a redirect of any kind, just changed the url Why is this????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Can someone please help me understand my sites recent loss of rankings?
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. I have a Page Authority of 53, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 40, user reviews and quality content. I did discover that another URL I using was set to a 302 instead of a 301 for some reason. I don't necessarily think this was an issue as Google should know which is the trusted URL and therefore which content to list. I removed this redirect completely about 3 weeks ago, but I've seen no improvement. I'm looking at improving various things, but I'm still not sure why I've been hit and wonder if I'm missing something obvious? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0