Migrated site back in April and rankings have not returned.

[PB2007]

I sure hope someone can help me with this. Back in April I migrated my site and did a website redesign. We implemented all the 301 redirect page for page. I lost about 40% of traffic. My main key word is baby headbands that goes to our home page. www.princessbowtique.com We were ranking at number two and have fallen down to number 9 and 10 and have recently come back up to number 8. My question is and I am  wondering if there is something wrong with my HTML Code, or something else. All other pages stay lost some rankings but not as much a my home page. This home page is what gets most of my traffic and we are really hurting. I've had to let go of my employees and it's looking really bad for our business. Anyhow I'm trying to figure out what I can do it improve. I migrated to Big Commerce and they did all the 301 redirects. All catagories stayed the same url but the product pages did have 301 redirects.

[MattRoney]

Hi Tiffiny!

Are you able to share the URL for your site? It'd be helpful to be able to take a look.

[MattAntonino]

You are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are a lot of factors at play:

1. Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall?

2. What was your main source of traffic on the .net site?

3. Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them?

4. Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile?

5. Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc.

Things like domain age, 301s not passing 100% of benefit, etc. will be affecting you but there could be other factors. It's very difficult to diagnose such a problem like this. Your old site had been online since 2008. That's a good amount of site age.

Also, back in September, Archive.org (Wayback Machine) found that your redirect was actually setup as a 302.

When I do a manual crawl myself or header check I see that it's setup as 301 but whatever sent them a 302 may have also been passed onto Google. I would want to check the WMT/Search Console for your site, Analytics and then maybe you'd be a lot closer to having an answer.

Hope that helps some.

[MattAntonino]

www.princessbowtique.com, redirected from .net

[MattRoney]

Ah, glazed right by it.

[MoosaHemani]

I believe you really need someone who can do the site audit and tells you what areas of the website need more improvement. I run a screaming frog on your website and I can say that the migration was pretty much done right.

Obviously when you migrate and 301 pages from only to new domain, not all the juice pass to the new domain so loss of link juice can be one of the reason why you lost rankings for any of the key phrases.

You said you were ranking on 9 and 10 and recently moved to 8 and while I was checking your ranking on SEMRush.com it says “7” so seems like you are on your way back to your old position.

Here are the few things I would suggestion you should do.

1. Hire a consultant to do the detailed audit and answer the important questions raised by Matt and few more important questions.
2. As 301ing the pages result in a loss of a link juice to new pages so I will recommend building few good links pointing back to the different pages of the website.
3. Also, update blog more often and see if you can engage target audience on your blog via social media and other relevant sources.
4. Also make sure your site speed, page load time, server connectivity and uptime is up to the mart as this can be a reason.

Hope this helps.

[PB2007]

Thank you so much for all the input. We did a migration from the .net site back a few years ago. We did lost some traffic but it did resume with in a few months. I have been on the .com site for some time now. We did another migration back in April and that is when everything went down. From what I can tell, the home page did not change urls or the category pages. The product pages have 301 redirects.  Also, in Goggle Webmaster tools there was alot of 404 erros ( fixed over 1,000) that show all these links that really were not even "real" links. This only happened when we change hosting companies. We are currently hosting with Big Commerce.

To answer the questions:

1. Was the traffic you lost 40% of all organic? Or overall? It was all organic,

2. What was your main source of traffic on the .net site? No, we migrated to the .com site in 2013 so it been some time.

3. Did you run Adwords in the past and stopped them? No, all organic

4. Do you have a manual penalty from some of the spammiest links in your link profile? No, not that I know of

5. Page-by-page comparison of the old & new sites: site speed, on-page contents, all the technical coding, etc. How do I go  about doing that?

[PB2007]

Also, we did alot of link building on the .net site and since October we have started building links again.

[MattAntonino]

My questions were just the tip of what could be wrong. As I said and Moosa repeated, you are likely going to have to hire someone as a consultant to solve this. There are way too many factors at play on why you may have lost some organic lately. Competitor improvements, your own site not crawling properly, parameters & duplicate content confusing Google, new site structure loads slower, etc.

There aren't another 3-5 questions we can ask to sort this unfortunately. Someone needs to dig in with your site, analytics, etc. to see what's going on. Exact dates matter (algorithm updates) as do how everything is setup for your redirects and all that. As I said, Archive.org saw your redirect as a 302. That could hurt you. There could just be so many reasons.