301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.

[DirkC]

Summarising (this thread is becoming extremely long):

• redirects seem to be implement as they should
• user engagement seems to be improved after migration

Performance seems to be & has been an issue - with unresponsive scripts & pages which are loading quite slow. Quality of HTML is (was) quite lousy.

I would stick to my original advice - and ask an HTML / CSS guru to have a look at your code, clean it & implement some of the performance improvements that were already mentioned before (to reduce the time to first byte). One thing you could already correct in the code is the location of an embedded javascript - it should be in the body or head - currently one script is outside the HTML tag.

Good luck

Dirk

[Nickys2211]

ok I think I will. Maybe I'll just wait a day to see if any of the suggestions worked.

Thanks again!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Nechemia! Did any of the suggestions resolve your issue? We'd love an update, thanks!

Christy

[Nickys2211]

That's so nice of you to ask

Unfortunately no! I even took out the whole front page (and just made it into the latest posts) which had almost all of the customizations, and still nothing doing. My traffic now is down to 1560 a day (from around 13,000) and only 117 of them are from google.

I just can't imagine what the issue can possibly be. I mean if the issue doesn't have to do with 301 (because it went down when I changed to this design even when it was still under greatcleanjokes.com) and it doesn't have to do with the customizations of the front page (because that's gone) what can the issue possibly be??!

Any ideas?

[evolvingSEO]

Just to mention, the site: searches are very artificial and the rankings for those searches does not have much meaning or hold any clues about how Google views the site.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

I think the issue is the design. Believe it or not, this is likely a ranking factor. I've seen the opposite - a site will get a new design and rankings will improve.

I think in your case, being totally honest - the old design was much better. Here's some issues I see with the new design that make it hard for me as a user to enjoy using the site.

• The top menu text (home, about us...) blends almost complete in with the background - you can barely read it (at least I can barely read it)
• You breadcrumbs sit way off to the left --> http://screencast.com/t/rsGKJ8cZc -- they are not within a container or anything, which makes it look odd.
• A shotcode is showing up in the content --> http://screencast.com/t/AoaexaPcL -- [get_laughing_image]
• The old site links out to facebook, twitter, RSS etc much more prominently - on the new site it's hard to find those buttons at all.
• So many of the jokes, especially with dialog, don't even have line breaks - it makes it incredibly difficult to read --> http://screencast.com/t/7udxq536

I'm sure we could find more, but the point is that I think the old design was better.

Have you tried the old design on the new domain?

[DirkC]

Dan,

I do agree with you that design is a ranking factor - but it can only be indirect. Google is unable to judge if the quality of the design is good or bad. The only way it can judge this is by analysing the behaviour of the visitors on the site. Nechemia did indicate however that after migration user engagement improved rather than decreased.

Dirk

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Dirk

My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.

I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.

Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.