Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after

[skifr]

Hi all,

Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net.

We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book:

1. Individual 301 redirects for all the pages.
2. Change of address via the GWT.
3. Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy.

4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000

The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects).

And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain!

Something is not right here, but  I have no explanation why these pages still exist.

Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!

[Ray-pp]

Hi skifr - Have you tried using the URL remover tool in GWT? And if you really want those pages out of the search engine, how about a noindex tag on the old domain?

[David-Kley]

I'm not understanding why your traffic is lower. If you have 301 redirects in place, even if your old pages show up and someone clicks the link, it will take them to the new site.

Another option you could pursue is a 410 (gone) for your old pages. This states to Google that the page has been removed and should no longer be indexed or linked.

But beware, you are linking out to your other site.

The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404.

[danatanseo]

I agree with both of the previous suggestions and thought I would add a comment and a question too.

Seeing a decline of 50% or even more in traffic after a site migration is not uncommon. Hopefully your clients went into the migration with eyes open, knowing that they could see significantly lower traffic for anywhere from 6 weeks to a year, and maybe never fully recover. This sometimes happens. That's why the planning process is so important (and management of expectations).

That being said, when you installed Google Analytics on the new site, did anything change in your GA tracking code? Sometimes this happens and can lead to old analytics reports and new analytics reports not being an "apples to apples" comparison. It's just a thought. It could be that the traffic isn't actually 50% lower, but has changed much less than that.

Has revenue (or whatever your conversion goal is) dropped, increased or stayed the same?

[skifr]

Thanks for the answer.

That's always a possibility - the problem is that these url's have not too few links (the old homepage is still indexed!).

If I'll use the url remover won't this result in losing all the link juice for those url's?

[skifr]

There is a perfect correlation between the organic drop and the revenue – It has decreased dramatically. Of course I checked for Analytics issue but all the other traffic sources have stayed the same. We have big PPC campaigns and the traffic data is correct.

About management of expectations – usually we say that we expect 3-4 months of traffic droppings, but this had taken us a bit by surprise.

[skifr]

Hi David,

see my answer to RaymondPP.

Also, what do you mean by saying "you are linking out to your other site"?

Did you see anything?

[KeriMorgret]

What happens when you go into GWT and fetch fancydiamonds.net as googlebot? Is there some reason that perhaps googlebot isn't seeing the redirects correctly?

[Ray-pp]

the URL remover tool would be one of my last options, since I too would be afraid of any authority vanishing with the old link.

Google must have some reason to continue to index the pages and I wouldn't want them removed until I'm positive I gained back all the authority I could, from these old pages.

• Are you certain the 301 redirects are active and working?

• Can you add canonical tags to the 301'ed pages?

• Make sure that none of the URLs in the 301 URL chain are disallowed by a robots.txt file. If they were in the redirect chain, Google would not be able to properly crawl the new page and properly index.

That last point may be what's preventing a portion of the old URLs from dropping, if they are being blocked in the robots.txt file.

[danatanseo]

Yes, it sounds like perhaps there is a technical issue here. I like Keri's suggestion below. Also, have you grepped your server logs to see if Googlebot is having issues?

It can taken Google a long long time to take down search results to old pages that either don't exist any more or that 301 to a new page. You may have to resort to using the removal tool. I realize that for 2,000 URLs doing these one at a time is inconvenient, but it may just be what you have to do.

I have some old notes on domain migration that I'll try to dig up, but unfortunately I don't think there's much there that's helpful after the fact. But I'll see what I can find.

[skifr]

Yes I have. I could see the 301 redirects correctly and without any further issues.

[skifr]

Thanks Dana. Honestly, we have a lot of experience dealing with site migrations - I read dozens of posts and we've implemented our own step-by=step guidelines for successful site migration.

As you can see, sometimes even when you do everything by the book you can encounter some unexpected issues.