Recovering from a Redesign?

[ScottImageWorks]

We recently redesigned a client's website, updated SEO (page titles, descriptions, internal linking), and have experienced a massive drop both in organic and direct search traffic.

We had an issue with the sitemap that I resolved last week, but traffic doesn't show any signs of recovering. What should I expect and what can I do to get back to where we were?

The site is www.rugcare.com, if anyone wants to take a look.

[KevinBudzynski]

Did anything else change besides what was stated above (such as url, headings, content & etc.)?

[ScottImageWorks]

No change to the URL. I believe the homepage content was updated, but most of the internal pages remained the same.

I did unique page titles and descriptions and added some internal links. I was planning to do more there, but I don't think that's the cause of our issues here.

The client brought over all the content from their old blog so that wasn't lost.

[HashtagHustler]

I wrote this before you posted you're response, so I will have to think more

Good Morning!

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is very hard for things to change online and have little to no effect be felt either positive or negative.

To expand on what Kevin is asking above it is incredibly difficult to examine what is causing drop in traffic without knowing what came before. For example, if you changed ANY of the URL's and didn't properly put in 301's that is a very quick way to get some of your traffic back. I ran your website through Screaming Frog, which is a spider of sorts and it found one 301. Without telling Google where an old URL lives you are loosing any SEO that the old URL had.

Another thing to consider is the content. If the previous website was a literal rug encyclopedia on repairs and was the go-to website for "oriental rug repairs", and the content was now shifted more toward "oriental rug cleaning" you may see a drop in traffic as Google feels that you have less authority with the new content, and have lost authority in the old.

Hope this helps guide a little.

Another good resource below.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-seo-disaster-during-a-website-redesign/

[KevinBudzynski]

I have migrated many sites, and typically I see a small, but noticeable fluctuation in kw positions even when little was changed. You mentioned massive. Can you elaborate? Were these long-tails or competitive terms? What positions, before and after?

[Travis_Bailey]

I'm getting something a little different out of this. I plugged rugcare.com into SEM Rush. It shows a considerable spike in traffic in June, then a very big drop in July. Joehadeed.com and bergmanns.com are showing relative spikes and drops as well. So there's a possibility that a bigger competitor is eating everyone's share.

Though when I plug rugcare.com into Majestic SEO, it shows 55K redirect links pointing to rugcare.com. Majestic picked this up in late June, which may account for the sudden spike in rankings and traffic, followed by a steep decline in July. It also appears that the site received a number of links from housecleaningadvice.com with the anchor text 'upholstery cleaning tips - rug care'. They appeared to be nofollow, and I can't find the links anymore, but I wouldn't take a link from that site at all. It looks like it's part of a typical blog spam network.

I don't want to scare you, but have you received any warnings in GWT?

I also can't find these three pages on the current site via nav or crawl:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131230215654/http://www.rugcare.com/carpet-cleaning

https://web.archive.org/web/20131014021917/http://www.rugcare.com/oriental-rug-cleaning

https://web.archive.org/web/20131014021812/http://www.rugcare.com/carpet-and-rug-repairs

Was there any particular reason for their omission? Do you know how much traffic those pages used to receive? It looks like the oriental rug cleaning page would have accounted for a chunk of traffic on it's own. Now it just 404s.