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That's hugely likely to have had an impact. No-indexing pages before they were ready was a mistake, but the much bigger mistake was releasing the site early before it was 'ready'. The site should only have been set live and released once ALL pages were ported to the new staging environment Also, if all pages weren't yet live on the staging environment - how can the person looking at staging / the old site, have done all the 301 redirects properly? When you no-index URLs you kill their SEO authority (dead). Often it never fully recovers and has to be restarted from scratch. In essence, a 301 to a no-indexed URL is moving the SEO authority from the old page into 'nowhere' (cyber oblivion) The key learning is, don't set a half ready site live and finish development there. WAIT until you are ready, then perform your SEO / architectural / redirect maneuvering Even if you hadn't no-indexed those new URLs, Google checks to see if the content on the old and new URLs is similar (think Boolean string similarity, in machine terms) before 'allowing' the SEO authority from the old URL to flow to the new one. If the content isn't basically the same, Google expects the pages to 'start over' and 're prove themselves'. Why? Well you tell me why a new page with different content, should benefit from the links of an old URL which was different - when the webmasters who linked to that old URL, may well not choose to link to the new one Even if you hadn't no-indexed those new URLs, because they were incomplete their content was probably holding content (radically different from the content of the old URLs, on the old site) - it's extremely likely that even without the no-index tags, it still would have fallen flat on its face In the end, your best course of actions is finish all the content, make sure the 301s are actually accurate (which by the sounds of it many of them won't be), lift the no-index tags, request re-indexation. If you are very, very lucky some of the SEO juice from the old URLs will still exist and the new URLs will get some shreds of authority through (which is better than nothing). In reality though the pooch is already screwed by this point

If your architecture is changing, (e.g: from non-www to www, then from HTTP to HTTPS) - just be careful that your developer's logic doesn't start 'stacking' redirect rules You want to avoid this: A) user requests http://oldsite.com/category/information B) 301 Redirect to - http://newsite.com/category/information C) 301 Redirect to - https://newsite.com/category/information D) 301 Redirect to - https://www.newsite.com/category/information Keep your redirects **strictly origin to final destination, and you'll probably be ok! **In the case of my example the redirect should go straight from A to D, not from A to B (hope that makes sense) Install this Chrome extension so that you can see redirect paths in your Chrome extension buttons menu. It's very, very handy for testing redirects

Hi - have you considered contacting the old website hosting providers? Any chance of sharing the URL in question?

Great point. I am planing to 404 beta so after some time all indexation will be dropped. Thank you so much!

Excellent! Thank you All!