Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.

[BeyondIndigo]

Hello,

The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects.

After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection.

So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself?

Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure?

I appreciate any and all input.

Beyond Indigo

[DirkC]

Hi,

I would try fetching these pages like Google, or use a tool like http://web-sniffer.net/ to check these pages. If you just do a visual inspection, it's quite possible that you are seeing the correct the page, but that the header returns a 404 instead. Check also https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en.

If they are really properly redirected, you can mark them as fixed in WMT to make them disappear. If not it's no use deleting them as they will reappear a few days later.

rgds,

Dirk

[ColeLusby]

Another thing to do is to double check Google Analytics code on the new website, double check robots.txt on the new website, make sure the new website is being indexed (I'm assuming there are new pages), double check anything and everything.

It is common for new launches to lose traffic for a little bit then come back to a better place. It happened to me on a large media site. The traffic dropped a 30% then recovered for a gain of 15%. Not sure why. But that's what happened.

I hope you find something or hold tight!

Thanks,

Cole

[Cocoonfxmedia]

We often find it takes 2-6 weeks to bounce back after a redesign.

[dynamyt100]

Sorry to jump in here but I am about to launch a redesign as well. I am only implementing a new Wordpress theme - all pages, content and structure is identical. The reason being is that the new theme is more mobile friendly. Am I to expect a decline in traffic?

[DirkC]

Hi,

If it's just a new template and all the other factors remain the same - you should have no (negative) impact. If you switch to a mobile template, don't forget to also test the speed of your pages & the size of your images - it's nice that the site is responsive but if you have a lot of very heavy images, and the sites loads slow on mobiles, the gain will be minimal.

The traffic drop related to site migrations is very often related to changing the structure, generating a lot of 404's when not all the pages are redirected. Google seems to be cautious when suddenly there is a spike of 404's and reduces the traffic for a while. Once everything is back to normal, traffic (normally) returns.

rgds,

Dirk