URL rewrite traffic drop

[Silviu]

Hello,

A while ago (Sep. 19 2013) we had a new url structure upgrade for products pages within our website (with all the needed 301 redirects in place,internal links & sitemaps updates), but our new urls lost the serps of the old ones and with that we experienced a big traffic drop (and since September I can't see any sign of recovery).
Here are just 3 examples of old and coresponding new urls:

http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Mexico-phone-cards-182.html

http://www.nobelcom.com/es/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/es/Mexico-tarjetas-telefonicas-182.html

http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Angola-Cell-from-Canada-55-407.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Angola-Cell-phone-cards/from-Canada-55-407.html

We followed every seo/usability rule and have no clue why this happened.

Any ideea?

Cheers,
S.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Tough to say with any certainty but a couple of things come to mind:

1. Was it just the url changes or did you change content as well? The old urls look more 'optimised' (such as it is) for queries like 'calling xxx from yyy', the new ones look more like 'xxx phone cards' so if content changed along these lines at the same time this might be an area to look at.

2. That being said, a quick look at your backlink profile shows a high number of 'phone/calling card' exact match links and there was a google update around the 5th of October which might have got you, especially if you changed your urls just before that to include 'phone card xxx' in the url.

As long as the 301s were working properly there is no real reason for you to lose traffic just because of the url change. If your traffic dropped in early October, I think the update might be the more likely cause.

[BlueprintMarketing]

What tools did you use to backup your site prior to doing this?

Did you do a complete index of the site using screaming frog or something similar?

have a look at this

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch

&

this is a bigger version of the photo I have attached.

http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif

most of the time you want to create links with out any capitalization.

http://www.nobelcom.com/Angola-Cell-phone-cards/from-Canada-55-407.html

Once you have found out what the problem is by using a crawler like screaming frog or Moz crawler

Try using Google's changed domain tool it will begin to index your site rapidly.

sincerely,

Thomas

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[Silviu]

Hi Lynn and thanks for your input,

1. No content, only url changes. Our main focus was to get better results for queries like 'xxx phone cards' and also for spanish queries like 'Mexico tarjetas telefonicas' (before the update the spanish urls contained english words..)

2. We started the link profile cleaning and we're still working on it (removed a big amount of 'bad links', disavowed others)