Domain Change

[SoulSurfer8]

What is the average organic traffic loss one can expect after switching to a new domain?

We went from .com to .org and are seeing 50% decline in organic traffic and 25% in Google news traffic. 301s were implemented from site.com/some-page to site.org/some-page and change site was completed in WMT.

This traffic drop seems excessive...

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Omar,

You really shouldn't see that much, but any drop should only be temporary. How long ago did you make the change? 50% does seem on the high side - I would expect a temporary drop of around 15% but have seen higher.

Did you update your sitemap as well?

-Andy

[webtheoria.com]

We had a similar project few months ago, but from a .com to a .com

The website gain all possions over just few weeks, with an increase in rankings due to improvements to the on-page SEO.

maybe these blogs can help (both mention also updating your sitemap):

https://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

[SoulSurfer8]

2 weeks ago. Just found out that each article was creating additional URLs with parameters appended to existing articles. Here's an example of additional URLs created:

site.com/original-article this article linked to:site.com/original-article/index.php?id=488923

This happened on every article on the site and we have thousands of articles.

I'm assuming we're getting dinged for all the extra URLs Google had to crawl? I saw a large spike in WMT post launch for pages crawled but that number has come down possibly because Google got tire of indexing all the bloat we had. Think that could be the problem? Articles on the site definitely aren't ranking as well so seems to be some type of algorithmic penalty.

[davebuts]

Hi Omar,

I recently went through a domain change on one of my own sites and saw similar decreases in traffic.

The site changed from http://www.oldsite.com to https://newsite.com

I know that my changeover was 100% flawless in terms of precautions and things that were implemented to prevent/minimize traffic loss, but I still saw a 50-70% decrease (this was also a Google News site - which had to be resubmitted after the domain change).

I posted a thread on Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum to see if anyone else knew why there was such a decrease in traffic and was surprised to have a few people contact me privately saying they were/are going through the same thing.

My site took 17 days before seeing a sudden jump in traffic and it continued a steady growth over the following 4 weeks. 17 days was around the same time frame it took for the others to see their traffic pick up.

Provided you've done everything correctly with the site migration, my advice is "hang in there" (which I know is hard)! It shouldn't be long before you start to see things pick up again!

Cheers,

David

[SoulSurfer8]

Hi David, thanks for the feedback. It's been over 17 days so there probably is something going on with the site. As I mentioned in my reply above, we discovered that each article had been creating duplicate content (URL with parameters). I noticed several thousand more pages on the new site than the old site. Do you think this could be the root cause?

[davebuts]

Yeah, having several thousand new pages on the new site would not be helping.

Just to clarify, you moved to a new domain and a completely new website at the same time?

The new URLs that have been created don't have a canonical tag pointing back to the original URL?

You should be able to setup a htaccess rewrite rule to sort this out quickly but I can't make any recommendations on exactly what to use because I don't know how your site is setup and how it all works (ie. if for some reason it needs index.php URLs with query strings in some areas).

[SoulSurfer8]

Hi David, yes, we moved from site.com to site.org.
We are running off WP and have the SEO plugin activated which has a rel=canonical feature. Pages on new site have canonical tags pointing to the new .org page. So no, we're not pointing back to the old .com pages.

We fixed the duplicate content issue so just need to wait and see if that helps. It's been over a month and old site still showing up in index when I use directive site:mysite.com. I also submitted change site address in search console.