SEO website migration gone wrong - noticed too late?
-
I have just been contacted by a company whose website has lost nearly all of its traffic.
The web developers appeared to know nothing about the SEO aspects, when it came to migrating the website (this website change took place first week of August) - the traffic has gone from 7,000 sessions to 200 sessions a month.
I can work through the usual SEO migration steps to help recover performance, yet normally I get employed on this kind of project as soon as the traffic loss is noticed... this time the traffic loss kicked in nearly 2 months ago - what are the implications of such a time lag re: SEO recovery?
-
Thanks for your helpful answers - much appreciated
-
Luke, generally speaking, the others are right--you'll want to get going as quickly as possible to recover the lost traffic. Most likely they didn't set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, and that's what I would concentrate on first. I'd recommend looking at Google Search Console's crawl errors.
If you can get ahold of the site's log files and analyze the site's 404 errors for traffic, then you'll want to set up 301 redirects for pages that have traffic coming to them first.
You'll also want to crawl the site and look for site issues, as most likely someone who didn't know to migrate a site properly may have missed major SEO-related issues when they built the site.
Finally, looking at the site's links and which pages those links are pointing to will be helpful, as that may "save" some link juice. If you can, get some of those links changed or updated so they point directly to the new page and not to a page that redirects.
-
Agree, it totally depends on what's up with the website. It may be more or less work, but unless they caused a google penalization for changing their website (ex. unwanted cloaking) it should be a matter of fixing the broken stuff.
Most likely google lost the track of their backlinks and without proper 301 redirection (which may have been sent all to the homepage is not helpgin them recover).
I would recommend try get access to their GWT first so you can assess how doable is the work for you. You can make a preventive analysis at no cost which will help you understand the timeline and weight every single action you'll need to take, and how much are your clients able to support you.
-
In my experience fixing all technical issues, making sure all redirects are properly in place and doing some link building then the site should recover well, even 2-3 months later. I rinse through and through on the technical side.
The issues start coming to the fore when content is killed, keywords are changed, directory structure is changed. You know how it goes.
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
-
Someone redirected his website to ours
Hi all, I have strange issue as someone redirected website http://bukmachers.pl to ours https://legalnibukmacherzy.pl We don't know exactly what to do with it. I checked backlinks and the website had some links which now redirect to us. I also checked this website on wayback machine and back in 2017 this website had some low quality content but in 2018 they made similar redirection to current one but to different website (our competitor). Can such redirection be harmful for us? Should we do something with this or leave it, as google stop encouraging to disavow low quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kahuna_Charles1 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Merging Pages and SEO
Hi, We are redesigning our website the following way: Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the other So we are merging multiples pages into one.
What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible) e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change? Thank you,0 -
Worth it to redirect .swf during a website migration?
Recently one of our clients switched web providers. We've been implementing 301 redirects to the new URL structure for the most important pages. We noticed upon doing a site search, Google has indexed a .swf URL on page 3 of search results. Please see attached image. 1. Should I implement a redirect for this? There are no links to this filetype.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE3
2. There are three others (.swf) that are indexed I would think the best thing to do is to have the new website return a 404 for this page, as it's currently doing, and it will eventually drop out of the index. Any other suggestions? Thanks! g2tur4r0 -
How to lay off your SEO compnay?
I have decided to replace my seo company. The pint is this company has been partly my developer too. So he has set up a demo server of my website. 1- Should I be worried about duplicate material when I end my cooperation with this company(The demo server) 2- Should I be worried that if they do not like it, they go and delete all the submitted materials and destroy my pages rankings? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
How to seo websites on another server
We have partners that want us to build and manage a co-branded white label for them. We will have unique content on the white label, however the white label will be located on our server. I was planning to put it on a subdomain and mask the URL, however was told that google will see through that and not give any credit to the white label. Our partners all have high PR and we are a new company with low PR. We want the white labels to get the credit from the partner websites. Should we do it through url masking or by changing the A Record in the other website to point to our server?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TravelerVIP0 -
Hosting Providers and SEO
I have been wondering for a while which web host provider is the best for SEO purposes? Things to consider. Shared Hosting vs Dedicated Server Location of the Host Provider Site Up Time One question that I have been thinking about is what impact would changing a host provider have on a websites serps ranking? Is there a possible negative impact and if so how can it be avoided? Name the top 3 Web Hosts for SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830