Any second opinions as to why our organic search website traffic hasn't recovered from website rebrand (domain change, website redesign)?

[nick49]

I am hoping to see if anyone in the Moz community would be able to help troubleshoot or lend any advice on a major organic search traffic issue we've been experiencing over the last 8 months.

In a nutshell, we decided our ~4.5-year-old business needed to undergo a rebrand in October 2015. After changing domains & redesigning our website (more below), our search-driven sessions have dropped 20% in 2016 v.s. 2015. We made quite a few on-site modifications (with some success) post-redesign but are still deep in a rut and not sure what more we can do to recover.

I've listed my theories below as to why we're still suffering this hit. If anyone could weigh in on these and/or share any other troubleshooting ideas, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it (and owe you a lunch/beverage of your choice the next time I'm in your city!).

• ****Backlinks - despite our efforts to 301 all links, I sense we have lost many backlinks. According to Open Site Explorer, our old domain has 1,172 backlinks (some from some very authoritative pages domains), 1,068 of which are passing link equity. In contrast, our new domain has 367 backlinks, 321 are passing link equity, and very few overlap with our old domain.
• Domain Age - we may have lost much of our reputation with Google as our new domain is much younger than our old domain (1-year-old v.s. 5.5 years old).
• Domain Name - although I thought to have common keywords in one's domain was a myth, I am now questioning that belief. Our old domain contained a popular, topical keyword and our new domain is derived from a term that is topical, but very uncommon.
• New URLs - our developer has insisted all links were moved to the new domain, but I have a hunch they were not. When conducting a "site search" (i.e. "site:websitename.com"), the new domain returns 7,740 results. Prior to our switch, a site search with the old domain yielded 30,000+ results.
• 404s - we found and fixed 100-200 404'd links after the domain switch. We still see a few pop-up today and I'm wondering if this is a red flag in Google's eyes.

For a little more background too, here are the nitty gritty details with a rough timeline:

1. Pre-October 12, 2015 - registered new domain and designed the new website on Wordpress, while researching a range of articles and resources for a successful site migration (e.g. this and this Moz guide).
2. October 12, 2015 - flipped the switch on the website design, domain, minor content reorganization, and social handles. We announced the change to our audience via an article, newsletter, and social; informed Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) of the new address, 301'd all links from the old to the new domain, and submitted new sitemap in GWT.
3. October 12 - 16, 2015 - traffic is normal, everything seems to be okay.
4. October 17, 2015 - search traffic drops by 54% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand.
5. October 26, 2015 - search traffic rises, so now only down by 30% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand.
6. November/December 2015 - re-added numerous elements from the old website such as category, tag, and page pagination and a few sidebar modules that linked to other important pages and tags. Search traffic rises slightly in November (down 27% year-on-year), dips again in December (down 31% year-on-year).
7. January 2016 - today (June 17, 2016) - we published more content on a daily basis and search traffic fluctuates around the 20% versus the same period in 2015.

• January 2016 - down 23% year-on-year
• February 2016 - down 17% year-on-year
• March 2016 - down 20% year-on-year
• April 2016 - down 21% year-on-year
• May 2016 - down 21% year-on-year
• June 2016 (until the 17th) - down 23% year-on-year

Thank you all in advance for your time and help, please let me know if you have any questions!

[Mustansar]

In my opinion drop could be due to many reason, Its hard to tell without having look into Search Console and Analytics of your account however based on what we see regularly, majorly  what you need to check whether you have received any Google penalty on old site in the past. Is your all valuable pages from old site redirecting to the new pages. Are your users having good and smooth journey.
Are you conducting any off page activity?

It would be handy if you can leave URL of your site.

[Vizergy]

The vast majority of my clients are hotels.  Because of this I deal with rebranding all of the time (a property switching brands, a branded property dropping the brand to become independent etc...)  If you feel comfortable leaving your old and new domains I would be happy to take a look for you.  As Ikkie said, it could be any number of things.

[nick49]

Thanks, Ikkie! Those are all very helpful points to bring up, please see below for my responses:

• On November 1st and 21st, our new domain received a message from Google via Webmaster Tools that they could not access the site (due to a server error). Otherwise, we have not received any other penalties.
• Yes, all of our highest-trafficked and most valuable pages are redirecting properly to new pages
• Based on our page views / session, we have no reason to believe the site experience (or journey) has been disrupted.
• We are not conducting any off-page activity or strategies at this time.

I did consider leaving our domain here, but I'm concerned about the effects of a competitor, advertiser, etc. finding this thread, mainly because we're an online media business that is widely searched. If you don't mind, I will PM you our old and new domain shortly.

Thank you very much again for your help. Beverages and lunch are on me when I am in London next

[nick49]

Billy - thank you as well, much appreciated! I totally understand how limiting it is to not have the old and new domains here, but as mentioned above to Ikkie, I'm worried about what may happen if this thread is found via SERPs by one of our advertisers or competitors.

If it's alright with you, I will PM you our new and old domain shortly.

Thanks again!

[Vizergy]

No problem at all

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Nick,

It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?

Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?

I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.

One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.

I hope some of that helps!

[nick49]

Hi Ruth!

Thank you very much for lending your help and the thoughtful questions. A Screaming Frog crawl reported 30K+ pages which is definitely higher than the 7,740 pages in Google's index. However, I recall that when I previously ran a Screaming Frog crawl of our old domain prior to the switch, it also reported a figure 3x-4x higher than what Google indicated. I am wondering if each bot/tool has a unique crawling method and if this type of discrepancy is just par for the course. What do you think?

Once we're out of this research phase, I'll definitely be diving deep into which pages were receiving the most organic traffic prior to the switch. It's a relief to hear I'm not alone in thinking backlinks may be contributing to this conundrum. Reaching out to those domains is definitely on our to-do and I'll be sure to keep your tips in mind when I do so!

Thanks again, Rush. I'll drop you a note when I'm next in OKC!

[RuthBurrReedy]

It's common for Screaming Frog and a Google search to return different numbers, but they should be much closer together than that. Which number is closer to your sense of how many URLs are actually on the site? When you look at the URLs that Screaming Frog returns, are there any that appear to be duplicate, or are otherwise not really there? Which URLs are appearing in a Screaming Frog crawl but not in the Google site: results? These will give you more information as to where Google is potentially having trouble indexing your site.

[nick49]

These are all great questions that I'll be sure to explore. Thanks again, Ruth! I really appreciate your time and help.