Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
-
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic.
I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
-
I was able to redirect all the links to the new site, so we shouldn't have lost anything that way. However, I did ask the webmasters/managers of many pages who were linking to us if they could please change the url they were linking to, to the new one.
-
Oh ok, I'm not sure what you mean by " ... wasn't able to get all of our old links changed over to our new URL, but I've requested changes from the "best" ones ..." then.
If there are old indexed pages that are giving 404 errors won't that affect the transfer of "link juice" to the new domain?
-
As far as I can tell, everything has been redirected to the new url.
-
What happens for old links that you weren't able to redirect to the new URL?
-
Thanks, Chris! We've done everything in the Webmaster Tools guide, and while we had an issue with redirects, that has now been resolved for at least two weeks.
I wasn't able to get all of our old links changed over to our new URL, but I've requested changes from the "best" ones and everything that is linked to the old site should redirect to the new without issue.
It's just anxiety-inducing to go through all this and see such devastating results!
-
Jess,
There are a number of processes that need to take place in your move and the time frame you mention allows for all of them to take place and still not see results yet. Perhaps you could list the steps you've taken so far so we can see if you might have missed anything. If not, here are a couple of resources for you review what needs to be done.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
Community Discussion: UX & SEO – Your experience?
We've been looking at the relationship between SEO & UX a bit more closely lately on the blog. Our good pal Cyrus started the wheels turning with a tweet: https://twitter.com/CyrusShepard/status/748296076411625473 ...and that morphed into a Whiteboard Friday idea, which was filmed and posted here: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/ux-vs-seo-whiteboard-friday We shared the story of one site that enjoyed rapid growth and that subsequently battled with managing that UX/SEO relationship on Thursday. And it's hard, right? UX and SEO teams often operate independently of one another, and may make decisions that affect one another's work. Sometimes it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation. Sometimes the answer is so radical and impactful that you may want to settle for a "safe" alternative. I'd imagine many of you have encountered some big issues with user experience and search optimization in your day-to-day over the years. What's the most difficult situation you've encountered with this? How did you resolve it? (I'd bet money on there being some really creative solutions out there :). Is there a particularly challenging situation you're struggling with now that you'd want to share & crowdsource ideas for?
Web Design | | FeliciaCrawford3 -
Switched from Wix to Wordpress dreaded hashtag URL
Recently took over managing a site for a non-profit which was using the dreaded Wix. Switched over to Wordpress but now Google still has the old URL's with the hashtag. Can't forward them in .htaccess and don't want to add javascript for fear of slowing down load time. I found a solution that seems like it will take hours and hours of work. I found the solution at http://www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ but it seems like it would take hours with all the URL's. I submitted an XML sitemap in Google webmaster tools. My question is, how serious could this effect SEO for my site? Google accepted the new sitemap but still has the old URL's in SERP. How long does this generally take to remove? Will the hashtag URL's penalize the site for duplicate content? If so is there a way to tell Google the homepage without hashtags is the page with original content? Sort of like the rel=canonical tag which I know wont work as the hashtag URL's all redirect to the homepage so they will all have the tag. Does Google ignore the hashtag? Could there even be a benefit to this, possibly the homepage getting more page authority due to the redirects? How serious is this? Thanks in advancing.
Web Design | | limited70 -
Learning Center on Subdomain or New Domain
Hello, With so much emphasis for SEO to develop unique, information content I am working to build out a "Learning Center' for one of my clients in the finance industry. As you can guess, this is quite a competitive space and their rankings have become somewhat stagnant so we are looking for new ways to develop original, share-worthy content for the site. So my question is, in order for them to retain the most SEO value should we develop this on a subdomain such as learning.website.com or a new domain altogether. Note: We do not want to develop this under the current site domain as it we want o only post informational content & courses and keep these pieces outside of the "sales" side of their website. Therefore, I thought the subdomain would be the best bet so that we would retain the most value for SEO... however, some of my colleagues disagree. Some vote it should be within a directory under website.com. Some say a new site & domain altogether. My vote is to place this under a subdomain such as http://learning.website.com with the idea that the site's authority will influence the root http://website.com. The argument I was provided against the subdomain was: "essentially adding a subdomain would mean you're sort of starting over again in terms of building authority. adding a folder will ride the coattails off the already established authority." Lastly, for clarification, the current domain is set up as http://website.com so the subdomain would be http://learning.website.com, the directory would be set up as http://website.com/learning/ and a whole new domain would be http://newwebsite.com. This is for a Wordpress site. Thoughts? All feedback is much appreciated!
Web Design | | TinaMumm0 -
What's the point of an EU site?
Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK 🙂 On this site http://www.milwaukeetool.eu/ the client wants to hold on to the EU site despite there being multiple standalone country sittes e.g. http://www.milwaukeetool.fr & http://www.milwaukeetool.co.uk Why would you ever need an EU site? I mean who ever searches for an EU site? If the client holds on to the eu site despite my position it's a waiste of time from a search perspective is the folowing the best appeasment? When a user enters the eu url or redirects to country the detected, eg I'm in Paris I enter www.milwaukeetool.eu it redirects to http://www.milwaukeetool.fr. My felling this would be the most pragmatic thing to do? Any ideas please,
Web Design | | Nightwing
Cioa,
David0 -
Google penalty for links opening in new tab?
Our web services provided suggested that Google doesn't like in-text links that open the link in a new tab. Can anyone verify this? We often link to outside credible resources for our audience, though it seems smarter to open in a new tab rather than risk that the person will not navigate back to our site after finding us. Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | jhamlin0 -
How will it affect my site if i link to a site with adult content?
We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.
Web Design | | MattWheatcroft0 -
Implementing a new Nav Bar: Best practice, SEO benefit, your suggestions?
Hi Mozland, We are going to have a new Nav Bar for our site built from the horror that we currently have to up with. We want to make it a simple affair, similar to The Guardian two-tier Nav Bar - main menu which will drop down to the 2nd tier according to what you clicked on in tier one. Regular stuff, I think. Any suggestions, from your experience, about how best to implement this, what to include, what not to do, what can be included and done to make it as best it can be to get people to peruse our site as easily as possible? Thanks
Web Design | | Martin_S0